


Before I Sleep

by staghag



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: 4x09 with Plot Divergence, Additional Warnings Apply, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon-Typical Violence, Depression, Ephebophilia, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Physical Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Torture, Recovery, Rescue, Sexual Assault, Sexual Slavery, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-21
Updated: 2017-12-19
Packaged: 2018-10-18 17:30:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 7
Words: 48,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10621722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/staghag/pseuds/staghag
Summary: Carl abandoned his father, injured and alone, in that suburban house to scavenge for supplies. When he returned, he found the house claimed, his father's life claimed, and he, himself, claimed.





	1. ulalume

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this](https://image.ibb.co/derLvk/fbb588dcb82e7d5671edc460a448d93a.jpg) picture, and the poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost.

* * *

 

**_ulalume_ **

* * *

  
  
  
The air felt different when he was alone.

It was thinner. Lighter. Cooler. To the point that the sheen of sweat on his skin felt like it’d dissipate, and he could breathe in without tasting the thick, balmy flavor of heat and death.

It wasn’t real. Not in the way that his old elementary science teacher would be able to rationally explain to him, but it didn’t need to be. It only needed to be felt. Non-interpreted. Unquestioned. Savored. Because it’d be gone the minute his spoon hit the bottom of the tin of chocolate pudding he’d smuggled on the roof of a stranger’s (mostly) vacant house, and the subsequent scraping, finger-licking, and stalling wouldn’t keep reality at bay for long.

Carl stared at the chocolate-smeared base of the tin, wondering how long he had before his father woke and realized he was gone. He considered that he was awake already, panicking, tearing that house apart looking for him, and the only feeling Carl could muster was smug satisfaction. The same satisfaction he felt at keeping that huge tin of pudding all for himself, as he licked the last dab of chocolate off the tip of his finger.

He considered not bringing _any_ of the food back that he found. Let his dad keep playing farmer and grow some damn tomatoes for himself in a backyard. Carl would carry the guns, blast away the walkers, scavenge for his own supplies, and his dad would still be toiling away with a hoe and some stupid seeds while everything around him collapsed.

Carl’s fist clenched around the spoon.

It was getting late. Even the walker that’d been struggling with the windowsill behind him seemed to be growing impatient. Carl glanced back to see its wrist dragging loosely along the outer frame with limp fingers, reflecting on its attempt to feed on him and coming away with his shoe. It wasn’t even moaning anymore, like it was bored. Carl would’ve laughed at the sheer absurdity of it if he didn’t think it would excite the poor stupid thing back to life and have it try to reconfigure a way out that window and into Carl’s skin.

 _It’s time to go_ , his mind told him, sounding suspiciously like his mother as his humor faded. _You know you can’t stay here._

Carl’s face fell. He looked back down into the bottom of his clean pudding tin, trying to make out his obscured reflection as the façade of independence started to choke under that putrefying, moist summer air. It was thick again. Carl frowned, and set the tin and spoon aside.

Before making his way back, Carl made the decision to slip back into the house through another window to snatch back his shoe. It was a clumsy process that nearly got him caught, again, but after managing to slip back into the bedroom and side-step the reenergized walker, he climbed back out the same window and slammed it behind him just as the creature’s fingers nearly hooked the hem of his shirt.

His subsequent escape route was a drain pipe to his left that made too much noise as he clamored his way down. The trembling copper summoned two walkers from a neighboring house, but Carl was gone by the time they reached the flattened patch of grass where he and his supplies fell.

No others followed his careful steps down the road as he made his way back to the white bungalow on the corner.

  


* * *

  
  
  
Dusk had started to break and the front of the house was already gathering shadows. Out of habit, to ensure he wasn’t being stalked, as he neared it Carl slowed his steps and made quick, sharp glances around the area, listening to the way the wind hit the trees and the hinges of the house creaked, trying to decipher all of it from the animation of the dead. The shadows on the porch, those cast by the pillars, the railing, the brush, either remained stagnant or fell back into place when the wind died down and the air silenced. All the shadows but one.

Carl stopped. He stared at the ground, where a cut of slightly swaying black shade peaked out from the shadow cast by the roof. His eyes followed it past the pillars, up the porch, and straight to the front door.

It was open.

The stifling heat on Carl’s skin suddenly went cold.

Carl could hear his father’s voice inside his head telling him to get out of the open and to try and find cover. Get behind a bush. A tree. Duck down. Listen. But he couldn’t move. His brows knit as he stared into the black space between the door and the frame, trying to rationalize why a door, that’d been tethered and secured, that had an entire couch pushed up against it, that had been _closed_ when he left _hours ago_ , was now open.

No… Not just open. There was a splintered dent in it. The upper-right hinges were bent.

Someone or something had forced that door open.

Carl was fighting the catatonic shock that kept his legs rooted to the ground when something slamming into an upstairs window snapped him out of his stupor. He dropped low to the ground and quickly slipped behind the shrubbery in front of the house, his heart pounding rapidly in his chest and his shaking hands reaching for the revolver in his waistband.

There were voices coming from inside the house. Loud. Deep. Carl could hear the low rumble of laughter and the screech of furniture legs on wood. He frowned, trying to listen for any indication that his dad, who’d been on the couch holding that door shut, was alive.

 _I left him alone,_ Carl thought, gripping tight on the handle of the gun in his waistband as his mind raced. _He was hurt and I left him alone._

Another _bang_ , alarmingly loud and close as the broken front door slammed open and almost fell off its hinges. Carl jumped, his hand jerked from the gun, and the tote bag on his shoulder dropped. Canned goods tumbled out onto the path.

Carl’s breath hitched.

There was a pause. Then a pair of heavy boots sauntered slowly over to the railing. Carl heard the creak of the wood as the stranger leaned against it, and felt eyes on the back of his neck. He froze. His spine prickled under the stranger’s gaze, and sweat slipped off his temples into the dirt.

“Well, well, well, looky here. I found me a little dog,” the stranger crooned with a smile in his voice. Carl’s hands trembled on the ground and his shoulders bowed. “A shaggy little bitch right outside my door.” A beat. An intensified creak as more weight pressed against the railing. “Hey. _Hey._ Look at me boy.”

Carl swallowed. He fought the chocolate pudding sliding its way back up his throat, and slowly lifted his eyes to the stranger peering through the shrubbery above him. The face that greeted him belonged to a man older than his father, with sweat-dampened gray-white hair curled over his right eye. The amused smirk on his lips broke only when Carl’s adrenaline suddenly kicked his reflexes in and his hand snapped back to reach for the revolver.

“I wouldn’t,” the stranger barked. Carl felt the aim of the pistol before he saw it propped against the railing. “I’ve put a lot of dogs down with this baby. It’s no hair off my ass if I gotta put down one mangy little bitch who thinks she can take a bite outta me. You hear me boy? Nod if you can hear me.”

Carl hesitated, then nodded slowly.

“Good. Get up.”

The man watched him as he unsteadily rose to his feet. He motioned for him to walk around the railing, to stand before the porch where the lack of cover instantly made him feel exposed and vulnerable. The cans of food he’d proudly gathered sat his feet.

“Anyone else with you?” the stranger asked. Carl shook his head. “You with the half-dead half-wit trespassing inside my place?” When Carl didn’t immediately answer him, the stranger strolled right up to him, and he tensed, almost taking a step back. “You as stupid as he is, boy? The man. The man who was sneaking around _my_ fuckin’ house. You with him or not?”

Carl’s mouth open and closed. His lips trembled. The stranger was close enough that he could smell the campfire smoke on his clothes and pungent sweat on his skin. He felt like he was being towered over, eclipsed and consumed simultaneously as the stranger aggressively invaded his space. The cockiness he’d felt not even hours— _minutes_ before, gave way to a cold hard truth as tears filled his eyes.

“Christ, you must be some kinda retard,” the stranger grumbled repulsively, reaching around Carl’s back to roughly snatch the revolver from his waistband, tucking it behind him, then slipping a hand down to pull the knife from the strap on his leg. Carl flinched each time, his heart racing as the stranger seemed to deliberately graze him with the pads of his fingers. “I’m claimin’ these. And you? You’re claimin’ the seconds it takes for you to march your little ass into that house before I stick this knife in your neck. I’m givin’ you three. Move.”

Carl balked at him, his eyes flickering between the stranger’s face, the knife in his hand, and the front door. He hesitated only long enough to hear the first word out of the stranger’s mouth—“ _Three._ ”—before he was hurrying for the entrance—“ _Two._ ”—and awkwardly shifting himself through the crooked door’s opening—“ _One.”_ And then he was inside.

  


* * *

  
  
  
The house was glowing with the yellow light of dusk. There were three more strangers spread out in the living room. Two were lounged back in the dusty sofa that’d been pulled to an angle near the hallway, and one was standing next to a familiar face unfamiliarized by blood and swelling.

“Dad!” Carl blurted in a low, wet voice, not waiting for the strangers’ permission to dive for him.

His father was on the floor, propped up on his elbows and visibly beaten. He took deep, ragged breaths that became rapid and panicked when Carl landed on the floor next to him and threw his arms around his shoulders.

Rick’s body was shaking. It trembled, harshly, under Carl’s weight, and the dawning realization that his fearless father was terrified and half-dead in a room full of strangers who might finish the job, broke Carl without warning. He suddenly began to cry. He closed his eyes as he felt his father’s arm slip around his back to hold him close, and a hoarse, damaged, blood-soaked whisper uttered in his ear, “It’s okay. Don’t cry. It’s okay.”

“Looky at what I found boys,” the familiar, sing-song voice of the gray-haired stranger announced from the doorway as he lumbered his way in. “Fate saw it fit that we get a nice little bag of supplies and delivery boy, all gift wrapped in one like a fuckin’ present from Santa. It’s Christmas in July boys! Now, hurry up and claim your shit!”

Carl jumped at the sound of cans colliding with the floor. He turned his head from the crook of his father’s warm damp neck to witness the chaos that ensued, with the three men in the living room rushing for the spilled goods, and three more storming down the stairs like dogs to a whistle. They bayed and hollered at each other over beans and corn. One punched another square in the jaw over a tin of tomato juice, and promptly yelled “Claimed!” when the man tried to snatch it back.

_Claimed._

That word hit the air like the flurry of insect wings.

_Claimed!_

_Claimed!_

_Claimed!_

Each man took what scraps were left of the supplies Carl had worked so hard to gather. He could feel his face flush with anger and frustration as his tears receded, and he found himself beginning to glare at the white-haired man standing in the doorway, gripping the grass-stained tote bag— _his_ bag—that had been abandoned outside. The man caught him staring, and an amused look broke across his face as he withdrew a can of peaches from it and slowly began to approach them.

“My boys are smart. They go for the salt and the fat like the cave-dwelling apes before us. It’s survival. It keeps the body goin’. But me?” he grinned, composed in his ambling stride and making direct eye-contact with Carl’s father. As he neared, Rick wheezed for Carl to get behind him, and managed to adjust himself so that Carl’s chest was pressing into his back. “Me, well, I prefer my daily bread soft and sweet. A little of nature’s sugar never hurt nobody.” The man squatted directly in front of them. Winked. “Especially the pink kind.”

Rick’s labored breathing accelerated in hot puffs through his bleeding nose. Carl didn’t know what the stranger was inferring, but he sensed the threat, felt his father try to tuck him further back. The stranger continued:

“Never mind that though—we got some business to go over, don’t we… Wait. What was your name? Prick? Dick? Damn, I’ll be donkey-licked if you don’t look like a Dick. Well, Dick, today is a day of judgment. Only there ain’t no God here to do it, so I’m gonna be steppin’ in here and showin’ you the way instead.” The stranger tucked away his peaches, placed the bag off to the side. He’d stopped smiling. “See, you might’ve planted your flag here first, but you _almost_ lost right to your claim when you tried to choke out one of my boys. You _definitely_ lost right to your claim when you lied about being alone. So now not only are you a trespassing piece of shit, but you’re also an untrustworthy, lying piece of shit.”

Carl could feel his father’s shoulders tense as he heard him rasp, “I get it. I get it. We’re gone. We’ll leave. We’ll leave right n—“

“That ain’t the point, Dick,” the stranger interjected sharply. “This here ain’t no negotiation. This ain’t no polite request for you to get the fuck off my property. This here is education. My boys kicked the shit out of you because you’re one life lesson short of a fucking diploma. And we ain’t done yet.”

A member of the stranger’s group approached, a man with a damp black bandana tied around his head and the butt of a rifle peeking over his shoulder. “Joe, it’s getting dark. We should board up the door and pull the lanterns before shit goes south.”

“Shit’s already south, Tony,” the stranger, Joe, replied without missing a beat. His eyes remained fixed on Rick, that smirk creeping back into his features. “Can’t get much more south than this. But!” He shot a glance up at the other man. “You gotta point. So, let’s make this simple. You and the boys finish cleaning the place out. Set up for the night. Harley and I already called two rooms, and Lou’s fuckass got choked out in the third—but I’m pretty sure he called claims before Dick tried to turn his neck into a fucking pretzel. If any shit comes of this, I don’t gotta remind you the way.”

Tony nodded, and the rest divided up, disappearing around corners and up the stairs. One man, thick and balding, could be heard in the kitchen, smashing a dining table and heaving the pieces into the foyer. The parts would be used to block the broken entryway door.

As the house rumbled and quaked under the weight of the strangers, and the purple light of dawn began to fade to black, Joe took his time in rising to his feet, a coy smile on his face. He nudged Rick’s ankle with his foot, and in a voice just loud enough for them to hear, said, “I suggest you take your time and reflect on the actions that brought you here. Look real hard into your boy’s pretty little eyes. Say some prayers. I’m gonna give you that much, ‘cause I’m a reasonable man. But mark my words, Dick: We’re gonna be square by sunrise. Just you wait.”

  


* * *

  
  
  
“I was wrong.”

The words felt loud in the quiet of the moonlit living room, where Carl was still sitting with his father propped against him, the back of Rick’s head nestled into his lap. From his angle, Carl could see that his father’s nose was broken, the skin of his cheekbone split, swollen, and yellow, and dark bruises mottled his throat. He couldn’t lift himself further than his elbows, and each breath was a hoarse struggle that sounded like it had to be punched from his chest. It was all so painfully pathetic, and so different from the man Carl knew.

When he spoke, each word syrupy with tears and mucus, Carl saw his father’s eyes flutter open and gaze up at him questioningly. Carl choked back a sob that risked waking one of the sleeping men nearby.

“Earlier… I said I didn’t need you anymore. I said that I could protect myself,” he said quietly. “I told you that you were nothing. I blamed you for _everything_. I was wrong. Nothing’s your fault. Mom and Judith aren’t your fault. You’re not nothing. I’m sorry…”

Carl closed his eyes when he felt his father’s hand reach up and gently touch his head, freed from the sheriff’s hat to allow the cool night air to dry the sweat from it. Carl leaned down, pressing forehead to his father’s and nearly abandoning what little composure he had left. He cried, as softly as he could manage, as he gripped his father’s face and melted under the warmth of his fingers.

“You… remember… mom’s poems?” Rick asked in a thin breathy voice. Carl paused, then nodded above him. “Good… You… remember… the cowboy one…? And the snow…?”

Carl almost smiled. “M-… Mom said he wasn’t cowboy. I just—I just thought he was because he had a horse.”

Rick did smile. “Yeah…You remember… what it was… about?”

Carl thought for a moment, reflecting on the warm summer evenings when his mother would take him outside to sip on pink lemonade and watch fireflies. She would cradle him in one arm, and with her other, she’d hold one of her many poetry books to her chest as she read quietly to him. Carl still remembered the gentleness in her voice, and the smell of her perfume—like grapefruit and baby powder—and closing his eyes as each story carried on the breeze. There’d been one in particular he’d loved.

“There was a cowboy—I mean, a man, who was on his way… somewhere,” Carl started carefully. “But… then he got distracted by watching the snow in the woods. And he didn’t want to leave.”

“So… then what… happened?”

“He remembered that he still had things to do, and that he couldn’t stay there.”

“Do you… remember… the lines…?”

Carl lifted his forehead, brows furrowed as he struggled to remember the words that had formed on his mother’s lips, wisps of her dark hair curling along her jaw and bouncing with each syllable. He managed to utter, “Miles to go. He said he couldn’t stay there because he had miles to go.”

Rick grimaced when a small, painful laugh nearly managed its way through his throat. “That’s right. ‘The woods are… lovely… dark and deep… But I… got promises t… to keep… And I got… miles to go… before I sleep…’ Those were the lines…”

Carl stared at Rick, realizing then that his eyes were glassy with tears. It struck him that his father had given up. That he knew, in some way, that Joe was not going to just let them go. He might try to bargain for Carl’s life, he might not make it easy on them when they came to put him down, he might do everything in his power to get Carl out of the situation, but his father was, in that moment, accepting his own ultimate fate.

Carl’s heart lurched in his chest. He leaned back, unable to look Rick in the eye much longer, and allowed the hopelessness and exhaustion to overtake him as he quietly sobbed into the darkness, “I can’t. I was wrong. I can’t do this on my own.”

“N… o… Carl… You… can… You’re strong…”

“I can’t.” Carl was fighting hysterics then, struggling to keep his voice down and sobs to a minimum as one of the men stirred nearby. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I need you. Don’t leave me. _Please_ don’t leave me. I can’t do this without you. Please. I was wrong.”

“I know… it’ll be… hard… Carl… And I know… you’re… very tired…” Rick wheezed. Carl leaned back down, pressing their foreheads together once again, shaking his. Tears dripped off his face and _patted_ against his father’s cheekbones. Rick continued, “You’ll… You’ll be very… very tired… And y… ou’ll wanna sleep… But you’re strong… a… nd you’ve got… miles… to go…”

“I can’t…”

“You can… You have to… J… Just say… the lines…”

Carl’s jaw clenched. He gripped his father’s face. “I’ve got miles to go.”

“Before what…?”

“Before I sleep. I’ve got miles to go before I sleep.”

“That’s… my boy,” Rick smiled, touching his son’s face and gently wiping his tears with the pad of his thumb. “Y… You’re gonna keep on goin’…. N-No matter what… No matter… how tired… Y… You gotta keep goin’.”

“‘Cause I’ve got promises to keep.”

Rick pulled Carl’s forehead down, and pressed his lips to it. They remained that way, each savoring each other’s presence, the smell of their skin and clothes, and the feeling of oneness that came with being father and son. Because that moment, a blip on the linear line of the eternity they resided in, would be their last. They would never have that moment again.

  


* * *

  
  
  
Carl woke to an explosion. He had only a moment to register that he was being flung back before his head _cracked_ against the floor, and he was blinded by flashes of white light.

He heard voices in the distance. Saw amorphous black shapes that only dimly resembled people—moving, speaking, looking at him. Hands reached down and lifted him from the ground, an arm hooked around his waist, another around his chest. Something cold pressed itself to his throat. A hoarse voice screamed in the distance.

“You leave him be! You leave him be! Let him go!”

Carl swallowed down vomit, blinked back the spots flashing in front of eyes, and tried to remember where he was. The room smelled like dust, blood, and sweat. There was a body on his back, large and with a familiar scent of smoke and leather. He could feel the bristle of facial hair against his cheek, and the sharp point of a knife at his neck. His legs were unsteady but the arms held him up, crushed him, made it hard to breathe.

“It was just me! Let him go!”

His father. That was his father. Why was he screaming? Carl grimaced, struggling to recall the night before, when lips suddenly pressed to the helix of ear, and whispered,

“Sshhh, keep watching daddy. Look at him. Look at daddy.”

Carl blinked. He tried to focus his eyes forward and take in the room lit with the pink of sunrise.

The furniture had been pushed against its walls. Six men stood in a half-circle around it. His father was in the center, on his knees, hunched over, covered in dried blood and black bruises, and glaring up at the man holding Carl steady. Rick was wincing with each word screamed, heaving the last of his energy into his lungs to get Carl released, but the arms around his son’s waist maintained their hold. The blade at Carl’s neck flickered between his throat and his jugular.

Carl’s face contorted as the night before seeped back into his mind, and he cried out for his father.

“You leave him be! Leave him be! It was me— _just_ me! Let him go!” Rick shouted, seeing the horror on his son’s face. “It was just me! I was the one who lied! I attacked your men! It was just me!”

“See, that ain’t do damn lie!” the man holding Carl barked out in laughter, making him cringe. “I’m proud of you, Dick! We made you an honest man overnight! But see, we still ain’t square, are we? I promised you we’d be square and damn it if I don’t hold to my word!” The man laughed again. “The boys and I, last night, we had a little get together and decided it ain’t right what you did to Lou. A lying sack of shit pussy like you who tries to strangle a man from behind got no morals—no place in this new world. Ain’t that right boys?”

The men shouted, clapped, whistled. Carl gasped out a sharp breath, tried to pull himself from the man’s arms. Rick tried to reach him, tried to get up off the floor, and promptly fell back down to his knees with a pained cry. One of the men came up behind him, and grabbed the scruff of his neck.

“Now, now, cut that shit out!” the man continued, pressing the blade into the skin of Carl’s throat, drawing blood. Carl went still, thinking back on the smell, the voice. It was Joe. “We might be a little rough ‘round the edges, but we’re still reasonable men, Dick! So here’s how this is gonna go down: We’re gonna show you the way. It’s not gonna be pretty and it’s not gonna be pleasant, but we gotta be made whole. You owe us that much. I mean—you tried to _kill_ one of us. Poor Lou here woulda been _dead_ if Harley hadn’t clocked your ass. You’re a fuckin’ killer Dick!” Joe snickered, nodded to the man holding Carl’s father. “But again, we’re reasonable men! We’re gonna make it fast. We’ll let you look into your little angel’s eyes while we do it. But if you move, if you so much as shift out of fuckin’ place, this here blade’s gonna slit your baby boy’s throat like butter. Then we’ll kill you. You hearing me?”

Rick’s red-rimmed eyes wavered between Joe and Carl. He swallowed down a lump in his throat, bit back on his jaw, tried to look brave as he forced himself to look directly into his son’s eyes.

“Carl. Say the lines.”

Carl’s heart fell into his stomach. He was confused only for a moment. Then his vision blurred with tears. “I…”

“Say the lines, Carl,” Rick urged, tensing when the man holding his neck closed in, withdrew a bowie knife from a sheath on his hip.

“I’ve… I’ve got…” Carl stumbled. His jaw trembled. His teeth chattered. Everything was going dark. “I’ve got…”

The men’s voices began to rise, calling for Lou, who held the knife to his father, to finish the job. _Hurry up. Do it. Do it. Do it. Hurry. Get it over with. Do it._ With each vowel the voices rose, louder and louder, until it felt like they’d filled the room like water in a tank, and Carl’s and Rick’s voices were drowned out. Desperation filled Rick’s eyes. He began to shout as Lou pressed his free hand to one side of his head, and the other brought the tip of the knife to his temple.

“Say the lines!” Tears filled his eyes, streamed down his face, cut through the dried blood. “Say the lines Carl! You have to say the lines!”

And with that, Carl snapped.

He dropped his weight to his legs and thrashed wildly in Joe’s arms, ignoring the bite of the blade to his throat as he screamed, madly, “Miles! I’ve got miles to go! Miles to go! Miles to go! Miles to go! Miles to go!”

He struggled to get out of Joe’s grip, to crawl to his father.

Someone, somewhere far away, shouted, “Shut him up!

Carl hit the floor, clawed at it, screamed his mantra, never took his eyes off his father. Joe scrambled to hold him back, snatched him by the waist and heaved him back up. He screeched, “Miles to go! I’ve got miles to go! Miles to go!” and continued to thrash, until finally the moment came.

Lou plunged the knife into his father’s head in one slick motion.

Everything went quiet.

Carl’s body went slack.

The world seemed to turn sideways as he watched Lou yank the blade back out, and a dark spurt of blood gushed from his father’s temple.

He saw a twitch of muscle in his father’s face. He saw his expression fall. He saw the light in his eyes fade.

Joe’s grip on him loosened.

Carl and his father hit the floor.


	2. do not go gentle

* * *

 

**_do not go gentle_ **

* * *

  
  
  
He couldn’t move.

The surface of the wooden tile felt like it could break the bones in his face. Blood pooled and slid toward the desensitized fingers of his outstretched hand. There were a pair of black boots lingering out of focus, too close to the crown of his head for comfort, and they shifted, like shadows, in and out of his peripherals. But he couldn’t move.

The voices of the strangers were slipping over his consciousness like oil on water. They were arguing, but Carl didn’t know why, or for how long it’d been happening. He couldn’t decipher anything beyond the sound of his own heartbeat. He couldn’t _see_ anything beyond the blue of the end as his eyes remained locked on his father’s; paralyzed, entranced, and completely and utterly lost in the profound nothingness staring back at him.

_“You take care of your daddy for me, alright? My sweet, sweet boy…”_

He felt his mother’s wet nose nuzzling his neck as the strangers’ argument continued above him, and the black boots in front of his face became more prominent with each vague and distant vowel uttered. Tears gathered in his eyes but didn’t fall.

_“You take care of your daddy for me.”_

The voices in the room sank to a low rumble. The boots that had been plodding into the widening puddle paused. Carl’s unfocused eyes paid little mind to them, so trapped in his father’s empty gaze and locked in to his own unresponsive body, that he hardly noticed when their heels suddenly disappeared.

Then, his line of vision spun, and he found his limbs hanging at his sides as something lifted him off the floor. He saw the ceiling, then the living room wall, then the shape of a face as he felt himself placed into a sitting position.

“Y… ou… i…n …. there…?”

_“My sweet boy… I love you.”_

“An… bod… y… ome…?”

Carl’s gaze drifted from the flesh-colored blur in front of him back down to the floor, to the body and red puddle. He pulled his hands from his lap and saw blood on his pinky finger, and stared at it. He was ignoring the silhouettes slipping in and out of the background and the voices that prodded at him, and didn’t notice the shift in weight at his side. Didn’t notice the smell. Smoke. Leather.

“H… ey… H… ey…. … du… mb… ass…”

His eyes had just begun to lull closed when something smacked him across the face.

Then his head snapped to the side. His ears began to ring. Something hooked around his shoulders to keep him upright.

“ _Damn it_ , Len!”

Carl gulped in a sharp breath. He blinked rapidly as a hot, stinging sensation erupted in his cheek, and the arm around him tightened painfully to stop him from tumbling off the couch. An eruption of laughter filled the room.

“If he wasn’t slow before, he’s gonna be now,” someone barked, sounding simultaneously amused and angry as Carl reached a hand up to his face.

The pain lit up every other nerve in his body. In a split second the hazy numbness swimming around his skull gave way to a sharp and detailed world that was sweltering, humid, and saturated with the smell of death. His wet and blurry eyes found the faces of the strangers rounding him like wolves.

“He’s awake,” one of them announced.

Carl’s mind raced. The hand on his cheek trembled. He tried to breathe, blinked to keep his eyes focused, and struggled to remain upright as his body fought him to collapse again as the memory of what just happened struck him like a fist.

“So, assuming you didn’t just knock what’s left of his fuckin’ brains sideways, I think it goes without saying that we need to have a little conversation with the flea-bitten mongrel here,” the voice at his side proclaimed through his own laughter, shaking him a little. Carl tried to pull away. He was stopped. “You ain’t looking at me boy, but I can tell from the look on your face that you’re actually hearing what I’m saying now. That’s good, ‘cause I need you to hear me when I tell you that you just got one hell of a conundrum dropped into your hands.”

Carl swallowed a lump in his throat, and tried to focus through the empty, flat feeling in his stomach. Joe’s touch was distracting from his words, too warm on his already hot skin. There were too many eyes on him. There was too much happening. He could see his father’s motionless body in his peripherals.

His inner voice screamed for him to run.

“Hey. You hearin’ me, boy?”

Carl dimly nodded, but kept his eyes lowered.

“Good. Let me ask you, did daddy over there ever take you hunting?”

He wrung his hands. Shook his head. The smirk Joe wore burned the side of his face.

“Do you know about snares?” he continued mirthfully.

Carl whispered a feather-light “no” to fight a guttural sound sliding up his esophagus. Joe seemed to think this was funny, and broke out in a chuckle.

“Well, shit. Allow me to educate you then. See, the thing about snares, is that an animal that gets caught in one will go with its natural instincts. It’ll struggle. It’ll try to run. It’ll keep fighting even as the cable cuts off its air supply and the oxygen to its brain. You should know that there ain’t nothing sadder than watching something do itself in just because it didn’t stop to consider its options.” Joe’s eyes became intense, cutting like a knife through Carl’s internal panic. His words became heavier. More detached. His fingers slipped to the back of Carl’s neck. “This is me tellin’ you to keep still and calm. Listen to me when I tell you your options.”

The hand suddenly grabbed his neck roughly, and Carl cried out.

“You can struggle. You can try to run. You can pull that same shit you pulled on me outside. You can do that, and I’m gonna let you, until the cable snaps your neck and you die like the mangy little bitch you are. Or.” The painful grip on him loosened, the heat of the hand slipped back to his shoulder, and Joe’s voice relaxed again. “Or, you can accept your place in the new world. You can accept the rules. It’s as simple as a hymn in church.”

Carl’s shirt stuck to the sweat on his back. His hands shook. He couldn’t bring himself to look up from his lap or the flecks of blood in his jeans from the cut on his throat, but he could sense that all eyes were on him. Sharp and patient. Like vultures.

Then the tears he hadn’t even realized were still sitting in his eyes spilled down his cheeks. Unable to speak, he tried to reach back and massage his aching neck, and Joe’s arm more invasively shifted down to his back.

“If he don’t answer, I’m doin’ more than smacking him,” one of the strangers snapped suddenly, drawing Joe’s attention away from him.

“Len, I’m about this fuckin’ close to clocking _your_ ass,” Joe shot back. “You know the rules. You too, Dan. I’m seeing that eye of yours. If you think this situation is any different than a cottontail or a can of peaches then you’re two bricks short of a load.”

Carl glanced up, confused and catching only the tail end of a look of disgust on one of the strangers’ faces.

“You were serious then?” the man with the bandana and the rifle interjected, flabbergasted. “We’ve been on the move for weeks, man! We haven’t had a bed warmer since Gainesville and you’re telling me you’re claiming that shit for yourself now?”

“Excuse the hell out of me, but I think I made my claim loud and clear when the sky was still black. You didn’t hear me?”

The expressions on the strangers’ faces made Carl’s bowels turn to ice water. He reached up to wipe away the tears on his face and tried to steady himself, wanting badly to get away from Joe’s touch and out of that tense, blood-and-decay-scented room. Whatever it was that they were talking about, whatever was happening, meant nothing good for him.

He needed to get out of there. He had to—

His fear intensified when Joe’s attention turned back to him, and he flinched when he suddenly leaned in, close enough that Carl could feel his breath on his cheek as he sneered, “I think you’re catchin’ on, but you’re comin’ up short on the grand scheme of things here. So, I need you to really, really listen, ‘cause this part’s important: I am a man of my word. If you do anything short of what I tell you to do, if you give me any reason to think you’re not followin’ the rules, I am personally gonna make sure you’ll finish out the day dead and chewin’ on your daddy’s limbs. I won’t even do you the solid of sticking a knife through that pretty little head of hair. Tell me you understand.”

Carl grimaced when Joe lifted his hand to the side of Carl’s head, and brushed a thumb over his temple. He looked up at the ceiling, avoiding everyone’s eyes and clenching his hands in his lap, nearly retching as he whispered, “I understand.”

“Good,” Joe said, smiling. “That’s real good. And because you’re so smart, I’m let you in on somethin’ about the way my boys and I operate.”

The thumb on Carl’s temple slid down to his cheek bone. Joe’s warm, damp hand was cupping the side of his face, and Carl felt every hair on his body stand on end. His stomach twisted. He kept his eyes on the ceiling, biting back on his jaw.

“We got a rule that says if a man wants to mark his meal, his bed, his territory, all he’s gotta do is claim it,” Joe continued. “Now for you, that rule don’t serve no purpose. But me, I claimed myself a little dog last night when I heard it whining like a beaten bitch. What can I say, I’m a sucker for a sad face.”

Several of the strangers begrudgingly left the room when these words were uttered, while Carl’s heart hit his stomach. His eyes flittered listlessly at the imperfections in the bungalow’s paneling and his pulse raced. He didn’t know what any of this meant, and his fear kept him from focusing on the idea that his final moments with his father were somehow tainted by this information. It would crush him if he let it.

“Do you know what that means?” Joe pressed.

Carl swallowed, felt more tears spring to his eyes as he struggled to force a wet “no” from his tightening throat. This earned him a snicker. Then the warmth on his cheek vanished and the weight at his side shifted. He released a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding and looked at the floor as Joe rose from the couch, and stood before him.

A hand reached out and roughly patted him on the head.

“Don’t worry boy. You will.”

 

* * *

 

They had allowed him to bury his father. It wasn’t out of the kindness of their hearts, however. The muggy air had sped up the decomposition process, and within hours Rick’s body had already begun to blister and yellow and the perfume-and-rotting-meat smell of fresh death had wafted into nearly every crevice of the house. Carl had still been on the couch when one of the men with dirty blond hair and a leather jacket approached him with a spade and ordered him to “take care of it”. He’d been reluctant to move until Joe passed by, yanked him by the collar, shoved the spade in his hands, and pushed him toward his father’s body without saying a word.

No one helped him. The others cycled around the house, collecting their things and organizing scavenged items from the neighborhood as Carl went to work, struggling to pull his father through the broken door. His eyes were clamped shut and his teeth were digging into his bottom lip to hide the emotions swirling in his gut at touching his father’s body, and it wasn’t until he’d tugged it outside, and had room to breathe, that he broke down and dry-heaved into the bushes.

The rest of the morning then passed like a dream. Carl, too exhausted and dehydrated to cry, had numbly dug a shallow, uneven, and unmarked grave, and had been collected from the dirt by one of the passing men just as the shovel slipped from his hands. He didn’t see Joe again until noon, after he’d been dropped onto the floor of the house’s entryway and had stayed there, breathless and wasted by the heat, the exertion, and the grief he was fighting to repress.

 

* * *

 

When those familiar boots approached him, he didn’t lift his head, and couldn’t if he’d wanted to.

“Boy, I’ve seen things on the side of the road that have looked and smelled better than you do right now,” Joe’s voice announced boisterously as he stood before him, his smirk louder than his words. “Seriously, you look like shit. I’m gonna go so far as to say you’re lookin’ like I stuck a piece in your daddy and made you bury him. That ain’t a good look.”

Carl’s chest clenched, but he didn’t show it. He instead focused on the bloodstains and scratches in the floorboards through the beads of perspiration sliding off his brow, tried to breathe. He didn’t flinch when Joe’s boot nudged his ribs, and still didn’t look up when Joe squatted down next to him, and roughly pushed the sweat-soaked bangs from his eyes.

“Listen,” he started, the humor slipping from his voice. “Answerin’ me when I speak to you is a drop in the bucket of the amount of things you owe me after today. It might not look like it right now, but I’ve done you a lot of favors since Daddy Dick took a bowie to temple. Hell, I stopped my boys from pissin’ on his body and throwing him outside two seconds after he hit the damn floor—and that’s the least of it. Me, I said to give you some time. Let you dig him a hole. And now your daddy’s respectfully buried and piss-free.”

Carl tried to swallow the faint layer of saliva in his dry mouth. If he had the will or the energy, he would have lashed out despite Joe’s previous threats. Watching his own hands deliver the dirt that entombed his father in some arbitrary suburban yard had changed something in him, the same way that watching his own hands pull the trigger on his mother had changed him. He was simultaneously empty and consumed. Both furious and numb.

When Joe grabbed his chin to force him to look up, Carl scowled directly at him, and boldly croaked out in a hoarse voice, “ _Rick_ …! His name was _Rick_!”

Joe paused. Anger flashed across his face for only a moment, before the corners of his lips twitched and he sighed.

“I stopped my boys from doing something else, too,” he muttered. His grasp on Carl’s chin tightened only briefly, a ghost of his previous threats, before it softened and his thumb grazed the skin just short of his mouth. Carl tried to pull away but stopped when Joe’s fingers curled around his jaw and held him still. “They were gonna turn you inside out. Dan, the big man, he’s been wanting something soft and little to bury himself in for weeks. But he’s got no self-control either. He would’ve had you a dozen times over and split you down the middle ‘til your intestines decorated the floor. You would’ve been laying in a pool of your _own_ blood instead of your daddy’s if I hadn’t claimed you.”

Carl froze. Joe’s intense gaze merged with the image of his father’s empty eyes. He saw his mother’s womb being sliced open, and his father’s temple being penetrated.

He stopped struggling against Joe’s grasp as a single question, syncing with his pounding heart and labored breaths in a beat that had been reverberating in his skull for hours, finally slipped through his cracked lips:

“What does that mean?”

Joe’s eyebrows raised. He looked down at his own hand on Carl’s face, at the thumb that Carl felt just brushed the bottom of his lips and made his stomach turn, and a silence thicker than the rot and humidity in the air settled between them.

“I can tell you think you’re a tough little thing, and I respect that,” Joe started after a long pause, lowering his voice. “But in this new world, even tough little things are still little things, and little things don’t last long out there without a group. The boys and I, we have one hell of a group. We can hunt and scavenge and kill with the best of them, and if we take you with us, and you’re a good little boy, you’re gonna reap some of those benefits.”

The nicotine-scented pad of his thumb slid up over Carl’s lips, lightly brushed the opening, and Carl’s entire body began to tingle—with disgust, and something else. He wanted to recoil but he couldn’t move.

“But if you’re going to be wantin’ food, water, and shelter, you’re gonna be playing the part of my obedient little stray,” Joe said quietly, reaching in, touching the tips of Carl’s teeth with his nail. “You’re gonna do everything I tell you to. If you don’t, I’ll take you down into the dirt and crush your throat like a baby bird. And I’ll make sure to go real slow, so you have time to think about the choices you made. It’s not gonna be pleasant. You’re gonna wanna apologize and you’re gonna want me to stop. But I won’t. I’m gonna press your adam’s apple ‘til it pops, I’m gonna leave your brain intact, and I’m gonna let you wander the new world until your little legs decay and your bones turn to dust in the wind.”

Carl’s jaw quivered. Joe’s thumb entered the heat of his mouth and slid along the tip of his tongue, leaving behind the taste of salt and sweat. He wanted to gag.

“Are you understanding me?” Joe asked lowly.

There was a motion at his side. Joe’s free hand lifted a shimmering bottle of water just out of Carl’s reach, taunting him with it.

Carl eyed it through tunneling vision. His dehydrated insides clenched. He thought of his mother, and imagined that the droplets of sweat sliding off his neck were her tears as she cried her last words against him. He saw his father’s face in the dark, felt his fingers in his hair and his forehead against his.

Carl heard him pleading with him, and as the words rolled over themselves in the back of his mind, the suffocating, hot, disgusting world before him began to fall into place.

Carl looked at rays of light piercing through the clear water, felt Joe’s thumb slide deeper into his mouth, and without truly knowing why, or what he was doing, Carl’s fear, sadness, hopelessness, and desperation acted on his behalf, and had him sliding his head forward and closing his lips over the thumb—disgusted, and hating himself for every second it was inside of him.

_“My sweet boy.”_

“Now that’s a good little dog.”

_“Carl. Say the lines.”_

_“My sweet boy… I love you.”_

 

* * *

 

The strangers didn’t leave that day. Neither did Carl.

Nightfall came quickly and left the interior of the house nearly black by the time the group had settled back in. The heavy-set man who had boarded the door the previous night, and who had been silently glowering at Carl throughout the day, lit several lanterns and took to the porch for first watch. Tony, the man with the bandana, was laid out on the couch with a can of corn and a spoon that _clanked_ in the quiet.

Carl had settled in the corner of the room nearest to the windows, where his sheriff’s hat had fallen that morning. He held it possessively to his chest, along with the single, near-empty bottle of water that Joe had given him for being “good.” His legs were folded beneath him, his back pressed tight to the wall, and he sat stiff and still with the taste of Joe lingering in his mouth and a sick feeling in his gut.

There was no inner voice to explain to him why he’d chosen to do that, nor what the burning look in Joe’s eyes meant when he had peered up at him. He only knew that it’d earned him the water he’d gravely needed, and despite the inexplicable shame that followed, in the end that was all that mattered.

Carl lifted the lip of the water bottle, took a minuscule sip of what was left. He tried to keep his eyes focused on the ring of plastic but he found himself consistently wanting to glance at the dried pool of blood on the floor, where he could see himself sitting with his father’s head in his lap, sobbing. He saw his father wiping his tears from his face and pulling his head down. The sensations were as real and as present as they were that night, and the gentler evening air and the quiet pulled at his heart in a way that it couldn’t have done throughout the hostile and chaotic day.

He wondered what his father would have thought about what he did.

_“You… remember… mom’s poems?”_

Carl dropped his head, pretending his father was there beneath him, pressing their foreheads together. He tried to piece together every major memory he could of him—every moment from earliest touch of his hands, to the final twitch in his face as he resolutely took the knife. He tried to imagine asking his father about Joe, about what was going to happen to him, about what he was going to do. Everything inside of him twisted and turned when he forced himself to confront that he couldn’t.

Then the image of his father’s bloodied face on the ground struck him. The arcane emptiness. The eternal void. He’d seen it in his mother, but he’d been too young to understand it.

Even the walkers had more than that in their eyes.

Carl, horrified, clutched at the empty air in his lap. Tears began to slide down his jaw. He fought the urge to sob to avoid drawing attention himself, but a sound slipped through his throat and caught the attention of someone nearby.

He didn’t look up when they approached him, their steps light enough on the panels that the wood hardly creaked.

“What’s up, little man?” a voice asked, hushed.

Carl pressed himself tighter against the wall, wiped at his eyes, and defensively gripped his hat and water bottle to his side. He tried to steady himself as the stranger walked around him and slid down to the floor, the air that trailed them carrying a faint, tingling smell like peppermint, and their hiking boots a wet blur in his peripherals.

Carl instinctively flinched when one of their hands lifted in his direction.

“Relax,” the stranger whispered, opening his palm to reveal a red-and-white-swirled hard candy. “I found a bag of these a block down. I saved you one. It’s not a lot, but I liked them when I was a kid.”

Carl tensely glanced at the candy in the stranger’s hand, repulsed until he caught the flash of a hunting knife beyond it, half-sheathed. The stranger was wearing his thigh holster. He hadn’t even realized it was gone until just then, when he slipped a pair of fingers down to his leg and found nothing.

It hit him just how powerless he was in that house, with those people.

Carl swallowed a knot in his throat. Without fully realizing it, his mouth opened against his will, and crudely blurted out,

“Why haven’t you guys killed me?”

This seemed to catch the stranger off-guard. When they stiffened, and offered no initial response, Carl apprehensively lifted his eyes and found a thin face buried under a knit hat that was turned away from him. The stranger was fidgeting with the peppermint candy in a gloved palm.

“Well…” the stranger began hesitantly, his expression withdrawn. “I guess I can’t really answer that, little man. That isn’t up to us. Or me. You’re not my claim.”

Carl stared at him for a moment before allowing his gaze to fall back to his own lap. His jeans were smeared with dirt and spotted with blood. The hand that wasn’t grasping the last two things that he knew for sure were both real and belonging to him, was laid open, covered in blisters from the shovel.

“You claim people?” he heard himself ask softly.

“People. Their lives. Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Because they have something we want. Because they’re in our way. Because they try to hurt one of us.”

With that reminder, Carl had turn his head altogether to remove the stranger from his line of sight, his skin beginning to crawl in revulsion. There was something dark and horrible about the way the stranger could come to him then with a gentle tone and candy after what he was party to, and something even worse about Carl actually wanting it—wanting _anything_ that wasn’t cruel indifference, or a threat, from anyone. It felt like a betrayal that he was speaking to this person at all.

But, along with the tears that wouldn’t stop glassing over his eyes, the words kept involuntarily spilling out of his mouth.

“Did… that guy, Lou, claim my dad’s life?” he asked gravely. “Was it his decision?”

The stranger made a sound of confirmation. His voice was neutral and low as he responded quietly, “It’s the rules. If someone steals from you or tries to hurt you, you get the right to decide the action against them. Unless you choose not to. Then it falls on Joe.”

Carl closed his eyes to repress the violence in his imagination, trying not to picture what his father had done and what had been done to him before Carl had found him in the living room. He considered that if he hadn’t left him, his father wouldn’t have felt trapped enough to act out. Maybe, if he’d been there to alert him, to help him escape, his father would still be alive.

“He was trying to protect me,” Carl murmured after a grim pause, wherein he mulled the possibility that maybe, in some way, this was his fault. “That was what he did. He protected people. Your group just kills to kill.” He allowed himself a quick glance at the stranger, eyes red-rimmed and narrowed. “You’re worse than the walkers.”

The stranger met his angry gaze with a slight, weighted shrug, visibly contemplating his response before muttering, “Well… you’re not wrong. We’re not the nicest people around. But, nowadays nice doesn’t cut it. Having a system, following rules, and getting in line, does. Being around other people who agree to the same thing and cooperate, does. Taking what you have to, does. If you can do all that, you’ll make it.” The stranger hesitated, then looked down. “So… a word to the wise: check that anger of yours. Joe might find it amusing for now, but when we’re on the road, no one’s going to be laughing. Giving him a look like the one you’re giving me now will turn you into worm food.”

Carl tried to swallow his frustration. He twisted the rim of his sheriff’s hat. “I’m not going with him.”

“That’s not up to you either, little man,” the stranger responded softly. “Sorry.”

“I’m not,” Carl repeated, gritting his teeth. “I can’t. I have to find my friends. They’re probably looking for me and my dad. They might be waiting for me somewhere. I _can’t_ go with him.”

“Okay, that sucks, and I get that you’ve had to process a lot of shit here today, but you have to know that Joe’s a man of his word. If he says he’s keeping you, he’s keeping you. If he says he’s going to kill you, he’s going to kill you. If you want to stay alive, you have to fall in line.”

A cold sensation was climbing up his spine. He tasted Joe’s skin in his mouth, smelled nicotine, saw the flash of eager intensity in his face when Carl had gathered the courage to look up at him from the floor. His stomach began to hurt, and a fearful desperation hung at his words as he whispered, “Please. Don’t make me go with him.”

“Little man…”

Carl curled into himself, anxiety washing over him like a wave as he dropped all pretense otherwise. “I can’t. I can’t go with him. I don’t even know why he wants me to. I don’t know anything. I can’t do anything. I don’t have anything.I’m not useful. I’m just—“

“ _Kid_ ,” the stranger interjected sharply, offering just the barest hint of pity in his hushed voice as he firmly stated, “You’re going to be a _bed warmer_. Do you really not get that by now?”

Carl looked up at him, and went still.

The expression on the stranger’s face made his heart begin to pound like a hammer against his chest. His mouth went dry. No, he still didn’t know what that meant, nor did he understand why he’d done what he had done with Joe’s thumb between his lips, or why Joe had wanted him to do it at all. But the way the stranger was staring at him made him realize how serious it was. He felt himself begin to shrink back, and his vision tunnel once again.

“Can you help me?” he asked, his voice sounding distant.

The stranger’s brows knit. He looked at him for a moment before shaking his head. “No, I’m sorry. It’s not personal. It just… is what it is.”

“But you’re his friend.”

“I’m sorry. Just go somewhere else when it happens.” The stranger began to stand. Carl dropped his hat and water bottle, surprising himself by snapping a hand out to grip the stranger’s pantleg.

“You have to…!”

“Little man, I’ve got to go,” the stranger whispered, reaching down to tug Carl’s dirty fingers from his denim. “If Joe sees me talking to you, or you hanging off me like this, I’m going to catch a beating.”

When Carl persisted, verging on full-blown panic and pleas weighted with desperation, the stranger dropped his candy on the floor and grabbed hold of Carl’s wrists.

“Hey. Listen, little man. Calm down,” he urged.

Carl paused, lips quivering between breaths. The stranger offered a dark glance in the direction of the stairwell, then looked at him.

“My mom used to have a saying. She’d tell me, if death’s going to come for you, don’t go gentle. Don’t let it just up and take you. So, do what Joe tells you to, do what you _have_ to do to stay alive, and don’t be stupid. Don’t make it easy on death.”

_Miles to go._

The sharp panic in Carl’s chest softened. He stared up at stranger, frowning and searching the back of his mind for his father’s voice, for some form of response or guidance, when he heard the stairwell begin to creak under a familiarly sauntering weight. The hands on his wrists vanished.

“Now what the hell is going on here?”

 

* * *

 

Joe’s heavy steps seemed to make the entire bungalow groan. His shadow slinked up the length of the wall, a creeping mass that made him seem larger than he was, as he stopped mid-way and leaned against the bannister with a feigned curiosity. His eyes settled on the stranger, who had given several feet of space between himself and Carl, but who seemed to realize that this still was not enough distance.

Carl was frozen like a deer in headlights.

“Billy, step away from the dog,” Joe said lightly, his casual tone overridden by the chilling look on his face. “I can see that you’re makin’ her nervous.”

The stranger did just that. He offered no passing glance as he turned heel and vanished to the back of the house, leaving Carl alone, on his knees and fighting panicked breaths that were building up pressure in his lungs.

Joe waited until the stranger was gone before he motioned for Carl to come.

Carl didn’t. He shrunk back, shook his head as his face crumpled.

“ _Dog_ ,” Joe asserted firmly. “Come here.”

Carl shook his head again, sliding back on his heels, feeling the blood rush from his skin and leave him pallid and chilled.

Joe studied him for a moment before very carefully asking, “Are you makin’ me tell you twice now?”

Carl trembled. Tears flooded back into his eyes as he remembered the look on the stranger’s face when he uttered the words “bed warmer,” and a garbled sob broke through his throat as he whispered out, “Please. Please just leave me alone.”

Joe stood, unwavering save for a brief sigh and a hand brushing back a white curl of hair, as he regarded Carl with an air of vexation. “Alright… Okay, I’m gonna give you two options, and you’re gonna choose the way you want things to play out. Option one, is that you make me come over there and get you. If I have to do that, I’m gonna beat the ever-lovin’ _shit_ out of you. Then I’m gonna drag you upstairs by your hair and leave you to whoever wants you. When they’re done, I kill you, and me and my merry band go on with our lives. How’s that sound?”

Carl shuddered, blinded by tears and panic, barely processing what was being said at all as the world seemed to fade around him. His lips mouthed pleas but no sounds emerged.

“Option two,” Joe continued, unfazed and holding up two fingers. “is that I stay where I am. You be a good little dog and come when called. I give you a little pat on the head and tell you you’re good boy. Now, I’m not gonna ask what sequence of events you prefer. I’m just gonna stand here, and we’re gonna try this one more time. You ready?”

Carl weeped, continuing to shake his head. He couldn’t do this.

_“You… can… You’re strong…”_

“Dog.”

Carl took a breath. Wiped his eyes.

“Come here.”

_“You’re strong.”_

He looked up at Joe, made eye-contact with him in the fleeting second that occurred between his order, and Carl’s decision, before the panic-driven delirium building in his cold body was swallowed down—just long enough for him to rise from the floor. His lungs clenched as he tried to stop crying. His legs wobbled as he stepped forward.

_“The woods are… lovely… dark and deep… But I… got promises t… to keep…”_

When he was standing right before him, Joe reached out and patted the crown of his head with a heavy hand, muttering, “good dog,” before harshly grabbing the back of his neck and dragging him up the stairs, into the darkness.

_“And I got… miles to go…”_

Carl thought of his father.

And he didn’t fight back.


	3. the valley of unrest

* * *

 

**_the valley of unrest_ **

* * *

  
  
  
The first step over the threshold and into the bedroom was surreal. He’d been there before.

The walls were a dark green. There was a small brick fireplace. A skateboard. Abandoned sneakers. In the corner of his eye, he saw the edge of the crooked flat screen television, the stacks of video game cases, and the serpentine pile of broken cables he’d abandoned to tether the front door.

A single battery-powered lantern propped on the bookshelf to his left cast a painfully unsparing white light. Beyond it, another threshold, into the space divided from the main room that was just large enough to hold a bed.

Carl closed his eyes when the fingers digging into his neck slipped away. He heard the door close behind him.

A subdued voice whispered on the shell of his ear to “stay”, and despite not knowing whether it was Joe or his own imagination, Carl reluctantly obeyed, and crossed his arms over himself to contain his shaking body as he felt Joe brush passed him. He listened as the floorboards rasped under footsteps, then, something hollow, like a bucket, being set down near his feet.

Then Carl jolted as a coarse, damp rag was pressed into his face, and dug abrasively into his skin. He winced, trying to turn his head away until the curve of Joe’s hand settled on his jaw and held him still, and the other continued to grate the surface of the rag into his cheeks and forehead.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Joe’s voice cooed sarcastically as the rag paused at Carl’s chin. “Look at _you_. There _is_ somethin’ worthwhile under all that shit. And not a single flea in sight. I stand corrected.”

Carl shivered, Joe’s breath ghosting over the painful sensitivity of his pinkened face. He tried again to move his head away when the rag resumed.

In response, the fingertips on his face tightened and dug too hard into his jaw, and jerked him forward too suddenly. Carl let out a sharp cry that was followed by silence, and then a firm order:

“Hold still.”

Carl complied, gritting his teeth and tightening his hold over himself as he felt Joe’s eyes on him and the tender skin he left behind as the rag dragged down his neck in a slow and deliberate motion. Two of Joe’s fingers slipped from it, inconspicuous and feathery, grazing the cut near his jugular so carefully that Carl wasn’t sure it was happening at all until he felt the slightest pressure in its notch; and then, his body began to tingle uncomfortably.

Keeping his head straight, he tried bow his shoulders and hunch in an instinctive but unsuccessful attempt to make himself smaller, when suddenly, the rag was abandoned altogether. And then, it was just Joe’s hand, touching his throat.

“You know, I heard you talkin’ to Billy,” Joe murmured, his voice taking on the deep, gut-churning, low tone that had punctuated it when he had been pressing his thumb into Carl’s mouth. “I didn’t hear everything, but I heard enough… And if gotta put up rules about you gossiping with my gents, I will. For your own good.” A square palm, too hot, on his neck. Fingers brushing the skin just under his ear. “You see, when my boys and I got together to talk about you and your daddy, Billy was the first one to bring up killin’ you. He even volunteered to do it. Said if I gave the okay, he’d take you out right after Lou did his business.”

Carl bit his lips, already wet and raw from the rag, as Joe’s words sank what little hope he had left of not being completely and utterly alone in that house. He hiccupped a sob, and Joe’s hand slid up and cupped his cheek, brushing a stray tear as it slid down his face.

“Now Billy, he knows the rules, and he won’t be stickin’ you without my say so,” Joe continued, drawing closer, and running his knuckles over the wet streaks on Carl’s jaw. “But you shouldn’t buddyin’ up to him, or anyone else for that matter. You’re not their friend.” He leaned in, nudged Carl’s temple with his cheek, and tucked his nose into his hair. Carl’s throat closed. His trembling became violent. Joe was breathing him in as he mumbled in a quiet, throaty, paralyzing rumble: “You’re not their anything. You’re _my_ good little dog. And you’re gonna do everything I tell you tonight.”

A shameful sound that could have been a whimper or a squeal, high-pitched and guttural, tumbled out of his mouth when Joe’s hand slipped down from his face and fell on his hip, and he felt fingers slide under his shirt. He tried to shrink back but Joe’s palm only drifted further up, the damp heat of it gliding up to the small of Carl’s back and coaxing him back toward him.

Carl grimaced. He had no point of reference, no one to explain what was happening or why, and his mind kept flashing back to being buried under the mound of walkers in the road, crushed, teeth gnashing at him. He felt smothered, and about to eaten alive.

After a moment, with lips lingering above Carl’s ear and grazing it with his breath, Joe paused, and quietly asked, “ _Are_ you my good little dog?”

Carl went stiff, the phantom brush of Joe’s hand on his throat. He slowly began to weep again as Joe nauseatingly stroked the skin of his back, and with his face burning in shame, Carl finally opened his eyes, and nodded.

“Good boy.”

He cried openly as Joe began to nuzzle the side of his head, facial hair scratching at his cheekbone and mouth ghosting his temple. The hand that wasn’t pressed under his shirt found its way to his waist and tugged at the clasp on his belt. Carl’s hips jerked when Joe violently yanked it through the loops with a _snap_ , pelvis colliding gracelessly into Joe and then being held there, pressed tight, groin against his thigh.

His breath hitched as he peered blearily over Joe’s shoulder, the obtrusive, sweat and wood smoke smell invading his congested nose as Joe dropped the belt and returned his fingers to Carl’s waistband, and pressed his lips against the conch of his ear.

“Take off your shirt.” His voice was verging on a growl, breath hot and causing gooseflesh to prickle Carl’s arms.

“Wh… What?”

Joe slowly pulled back, the invasive heat of his body mercifully receding. His steel-colored eyes were razor-sharp, unconcerned, and edged with craving. His fingers were touching the button on Carl’s jeans as he firmly repeated, “Take. Off. Your. Shirt.”

Carl felt like the wind was knocked out of him. He hesitated only briefly before his cold hands fumbled, his mind racing as he struggled to breathe. Joe was watching calmly, taking just the slightest step back for Carl to unsteadily peel the sweat-dampened fabric off his back, until he slipped out of it and felt cool air on his skin. He then stood there, clutching it to his bare chest, eyes diverted, wanting to disappear.

At first, Joe said nothing— _did_ nothing, and the stillness made Carl’s stomach turn as his naked shoulders curved in again, and he tried harder to cover himself. Then, he whimpered when he felt Joe reach around him and grasp his upper-arm, guiding him back into him until he felt the scratch of Joe’s vest on his spine. It made his shaking uncontrollable. His knuckles were white when Joe pressed him tight against him, and leaned into his ear.

“Shh… Calm down, boy. Calm down,” he whispered, slipping his hands along Carl’s hips, returning to the button of his jeans and unfastening them. “This part won’t hurt.”

When he touched his zipper, Carl reflexively jerked back, felt something prod him, and promptly went white as Joe held him there against it.

His crying fit subsided, and suddenly he felt like he couldn’t move as Joe began to grind into him and slide his zipper down, sighing into his neck, “ _God_ , you smell like shit, you fucking mongrel… You’re lucky you’ve got those pretty little blues, and those pouty little lips.” He nipped at Carl’s earlobe, the husky timbre of his voice making Carl shudder more than the pain. “ _Shit_ , I’m gonna be putting them to work tonight.”

Carl said nothing, lightheaded and pale as he gripped his shirt like it was his lifeline. His entire body was rigid and cold against Joe’s, being dug into, trembling as a hand flattened against the inner curve of his hip and slipped inside his jeans, roughly squeezing and massaging the skin dangerously close to his groin. He felt a warmth spread throughout his thighs, and his stomach twisted. A dry-heave pushed its way up the base of his throat as he realized that his body was reacting.

Joe’s teeth glided along the helix of his ear, nibbling crudely, lips finding his earlobe again and briefly sucking and biting at it. He withdrew his hand from Carl’s pants and slid it back up to his throat, applying just the slightest bit of pressure as he ground himself against him one last time, and growled, “Go to the bed. Now.”

And just like that, he was gone.

Carl stood there for a moment, dazed with pink in his cheeks and breath tumbling from his mouth in shallow gasps as Joe withdrew from him. His unsteady hands tried to hide his erection with his shirt. He could hear Joe behind him but he didn’t dare turn around. Instead, he tried to force his wobbling legs forward with such effort he thought he’d collapse.

His inner voice, meanwhile, was terrifyingly silent. He could hear the rapid beat of his heart pounding against his rib cage, heard shuffling as Joe undressed leisurely behind him, but any echo of encouragement or reassurance in his parents’ voices had vanished as he approached the cramped space with the twin-sized bed, shamefully struggling to conceal his body’s arousal.

He glanced up, and stared at the bed that not even days ago he’d been lounging around on, eating dry cereal, and waiting for his dad to wake up. The paperback he’d been reading was on the floor near his feet.

He looked down at it. Considered trying to run.

But he didn’t.

Carl flinched when hands suddenly touched his shoulders. Teeth returned to his ear. He cried out when Joe bit him harder and dug his fingers into his skin, forcing Carl’s head to twist back until he was leaning into him. His voice was a low thrum as he whispered darkly, “It’s time to get on your knees, boy.”

Carl ground his teeth, tense. He waited until Joe’s palms began to apply pressure, and then, he sunk, his legs slowly giving out as his line of vision became level with the low frame of the bed.

His eyes dropped when Joe walked around him. That permeating smell of sweat and the balmy warmth of his body became overwhelming, and Carl thought he might choke on it when Joe came to stand directly in front of him, naked legs inches from his face.

“You remember this afternoon?” Joe asked above him, reaching down and grasping his chin, fingers curled into his jaw—just like before. “You might not know more than a pig does about Sunday, but boy, you know how to use that mouth.” He lifted Carl’s face, forcing him to look up until he felt like he might be sick, a sheen of cold sweat sliding down his back. “It’s high time you paid me back for everything I did for you today. Let’s put those lips back to work.”

Carl shrunk back until Joe’s nails were digging into his jaw. He couldn’t do this. His father was wrong. He was weak, and the proof was in the tears that sprang back into his eyes as his lips quibbled out, “Please. I can’t. Please. I can’t. Please. Just leave me alone. I can’t. Please. Please. Please…”

Carl was still begging, every word nasally and moist as it slipped through his cracked lips, when Joe began to slide his thumb back to his mouth. Carl wanted to gag. He wanted to bite down and scream, but he only began to weep again as the memory of that afternoon slid over him like a blanket. He prayed there was no afterlife, no fluffy cloud that his parents were looking down on him from, as he sat there half-naked on his knees, Joe’s erection so close to his face and his invasive thumb leaving a musty trail on his tongue.

 _I’m sorry,_ was all he could think. _I’m so sorry._

“If you bite me,” Joe warned quietly, his free hand sliding Carl’s bangs from his eyes. “I’m gonna twist your neck ‘til it snaps. Understand?”

Carl weakly nodded. He waited until Joe removed his thumb from his mouth before he swallowed apprehensively, knowing what was about to happen without having to be taught or told. He closed his eyes. Tears dripped down to his neck. He felt the heat before actual touch of the flesh, and he was certain, that even before it had slid through his lips and touched his tongue, that he was going to vomit.

And then it entered.

It was hot, throbbing, and thick, and it tasted like salt. It filled the entirety of his mouth, just grazing the back of his throat and causing a spasm in his chest when it triggered his gag reflex. Joe sighed above him.

“Jesus.”

Carl tried not to puke as he sat there, numb, and still needlessly clutching his shirt to his chest as Joe buried himself into his mouth. He could feel the bristle of pubic hair on his cheeks, and the heat from his thighs centimeters from his nose. The weight of the shaft was hurting his jaw and he could detect every pulsing vein. It was overwhelming, and Joe’s hand had to slide back to grip his hair and hold him in place when he tried to pull away.

“Hold still,” Joe breathed, clutching his hair painfully. “Keep that mouth where it is, or I’ll break it.”

Just then, Joe suddenly thrust into him.

One of Carl’s palms hit the floor.

Joe’s hand kept his head from jerking back, but his throat still seized up, and he gagged. He vaguely heard a snicker above him, but couldn’t open his watering eyes to see.

Another thrust. Rougher. Joe’s fingers dug into his scalp, and his pulsating length engulfed his mouth and throat, trailing something sticky and vaguely sweet on the back of his tongue with each jerk. He could hardly breathe, and he wanted to cry, but he was too horrified to move or do anything other than sit there as Joe’s hips began to rhythmically pump into him.

It verged on painful, and moved too rapidly for Carl to be able to prepare himself for the next thrust. The head choked him and every muscle in his chest crimped when he fought the urge to cough. At one point, he unintentionally closed his lips around the wet shaft, and he heard Joe moan. It was deep, thick, rumbling sound that Carl felt on his tongue, and it only made the thrusts more violent, causing Carl to curl his fingers into the floor to keep from being jerked back.

It went on.

Until suddenly, Joe stopped, just as the skin under Carl’s nails broke digging into the wood.

Joe’s tight grip on his hair slowly softened. Drew up. Touched the crown of his head, as he began to pull out of him.

Carl tensely opened his eyes, vision blurred, mouth pink and wet. A trail of spit followed the throbbing red head as it unexpectedly slipped from his lips.

He shook, throat flexing as he fought the rise of acid and bile, tongue raw and tasting of that sickly-sweet substance. The shirt he held slumped from his arms, and immediately he saw Joe’s hazy eyes fall to his groin. A chuckle followed, but Carl hadn’t realized he was still partially erect until Joe reached down and ran his fingers through his hair, and snickered out,

“You really are a fuckin’ mongrel.”

Carl’s face began to burn. He tried to gather his shirt back to hide himself, but Joe reached down, and tore it away from him.

Then, without warning, Joe moved behind him, and hooked his arm around his chest. Carl cried out when he was briefly lifted from the floor and shoved forward, only to be dropped back down again, knees slamming into the panels. Hands dug back into the skin of his neck and drove his torso into an angle, bending him over the side of the bed, face crammed into the sheets. He felt his pelvis strike the hardwood frame, and he gasped.

“But you’re now _my_ little fuckin’ mongrel, aren’t you?” Joe laughed gruffly above him, his free hand tugging at the loose waistband of his jeans. “You’re _my_ little dog. You’re _my_ boy, not your dead daddy’s, aren’t you?”

Carl closed his eyes at this, felt more tears, more building sobs, tried not to think of his father in that moment as pain radiated out from his hipbones and Joe’s hand dug into his neck. He had no comprehension of what was about to happen, and could only imagine the walkers, the corpses collapsed on him, all the times he was nearly devoured by some snapping skull. That same heart-puncturing horror consumed him until he couldn’t think at all.

Humiliated, terrified, he just grunted when the cool air grazed the sweat on his thighs as Joe yanked down his jeans. Kept his eyes clamped when Joe leaned into him, shaft touching his skin, nudged the back of his ear with his nose.

“Say it.”

Carl’s wet lips pulled back into a grimace. His heart thundered. His self-loathing nearly choked him as tears fell from the bridge of his nose into the bedspread, and mentally, he apologized to his father again. “I’m yours.”

“Not your daddy’s.”

“Not my daddy’s.”

“Good boy.”

The last thing he heard was a bark of a laugh that prickled along his bare spine.

Then, pain.

Carl’s entire body went rigid. His mouth fell open. His fingers twisted the sheets into his fists.

For a fraction of a second he only felt the chest-crushing weight of Joe on top of him, digging his hips into the bedframe, one damp palm pressing on his lower back. Then it was there. Inside of him. Something hot, severe, slowly burrowing.

He was killing him.

Carl saw white. His pulse raced, a scream rolled up from his torso like a wave and became lodged in his throat until he couldn’t breathe, and he flailed, grasping for anything within reach. His bloodied fingertips hooked onto the opposite end of the mattress and held on for dear life as Joe pressed harder into his neck, while his other hand touched at the wall, searching for something—anything. He managed to heave a low cry as his pelvis rocked and his waist twitched against the searing intrusion that felt like it was trying to split him in half, but Joe held him in place, the hand on his back reaching down and digging into the fold of his inner thigh.

It pressed, languid and excruciating, until Carl felt Joe’s hips nestle against him. And then it stopped.

Carl went still.

His face was chalk-white as his fingers very, very slowly, released the edge of the mattress. He carefully brought his arms back, chest jerking with sporadic muscle spasms, back covered in sweat, and settled down into the sheets. He felt Joe release his neck, but didn’t move. Scarcely breathed. Just stared off to the side, eyes unfocused, fingers quivering against the bed, occasionally lurching as his body convulsed under the stress.

An eerie quiet followed.

For several minutes, Joe did little more than massage his hand down Carl’s side in an achingly intimate gesture. He said nothing. Seemed to expect nothing. But the minutes wore on, and as the shock in his system slowly tempered, Carl began to feel a faint tremor of impatience in Joe’s chest as it pressed into his back. He also felt that skewering sensation that could very well have been splintering his body, dividing it, was very gradually receding, until eventually it was just a dull, hot ache that pulsed with his heartbeat.

Carl’s lips numbly parted. His eyes glazed over as he tried to speak, only for his voice to come out in the form of a wisp-thin breath as Joe began to rise.

“Please… stop.”

Joe paused before he released a chest-deep sigh and adjusted his hips. He stroked Carl’s side again, chillingly gentle against the muscles that strained into his movements, and quietly muttered, “You’re a real fuckin’ talker, aren’t you?”

Carl swallowed, and stared distantly at the empty space next to him as Joe began to chuckle.

“You’ve been beatin’ those gums since Lou introduced Daddy Dick’s brains to a knife.” He brought his hand down, dug his fingers into the skin of Carl’s hip, and tried to press himself in tighter, digging into him, until Carl’s jaw dropped in a silent cry, and he clenched the bedspread. Joe breathed out a moan before wavering. “Oh… wait.” Movements halted. “That wasn’t his name, was it? What was your daddy’s name?”

Carl’s brows furrowed slightly. His glassy eyes flittered between the end of the bedframe and the window behind it, unfocused.

“Don’t be shy now,” Joe murmured, hips twisting painfully, reigniting the sharp, burning sensation that made Carl’s back shudder. “ _Fuck._ You were _real_ intent on me knowin’ your daddy’s name earlier today. So let’s fuckin’ hear it. Let’s hear your daddy’s name.”

Carl’s mouth opened and closed, confused, hands twisting in the sheets. His disjointed thoughts scrambled to make sense of the question as he felt Joe’s palm return to his lower-back and begin to apply pressure, steadying and bracing him. His voice caught.

He felt Joe begin to pull back, slipping out of him with a stomach-clenching, siphoning sensation that seemed to be turning him inside out, and his torso abruptly went stiff again. He tried to ask him, beg him, to stop, but the next sound that emerged from his throat was a guttural wail when, without warning, Joe suddenly thrust back into him with such force that his pelvis crashed back into the bedframe.

A nerve-fracturing burst of fire erupted in his lower-body, lasted for what felt like an eternity as Carl’s damp, ghastly white face contorted. Then the siphoning sensation returned, pulling, drawing out his insides, dragging something else out with it as Carl felt something trickle down his skin. Then another thrust. Hot. Sharp. Carving him. Withdrawing. Thrusting. Withdrawing. Thrusting.

Carl’s chest jerked against the bed. His eyes were open, unfocused, and wet as he felt a numbness slowly begin to settle in, while Joe breathily started to taunt him from behind, laughing into his own moans,

“Say it. Say your daddy’s name. Let’s hear your daddy’s name. Say your daddy’s name.”

Carl imagined his father’s face beside him on the bedspread, blood pooling from his temple, covered in the dirt Carl had buried him in.

“Rick…”

Another thrust lurched him forward. The colorless lips on Carl’s face separated, voice barely a whisper as tears streamed into the sheets.

“Rick…”

_Lurch._

“Rick...”

_Lurch._

“Rick…”

_Lurch._

“Rick…”

  
  


* * *

  
  
  
Carl would go on to remember very little about that night.

But Joe would later tell him, in passing, that after it happened, he cried for his mother.

  
  


* * *

  
  
  
The next morning brought with it the stifling heat.

Sunlight beat down through the window at the end of the bed, hot on Carl’s exposed shoulder blades as he lied flat on his stomach, arms tucked beneath a pillow, staring off to the side.

He didn’t remember waking. But he didn’t remember sleeping, either. He did know that one minute Joe had been next to him, snoring softly, his larger naked body cramming Carl into the wall with the oppressive lack of space in the twin-sized bed, and then, he was gone, somewhere downstairs with the other rolling voices. But his presence was still prominent. The heat and sweat from his skin was still embedded in the sheets. Carl couldn’t turn his head without smelling him, and it felt like he was still there, watching, fingers hovering over his throat, warning him again and again and again, not to move.

So Carl didn’t.

And he couldn’t.

At some point—maybe it had been before he’d woken, he couldn’t remember—he realized that every muscle from his waist to his ankles crimped and would scream in agony when he tried to twist out of the fetal position he had somehow contorted himself into in the night. He couldn’t sit up, or lie on his back. Not without reigniting something inside of himself—a sensation like his interior was being filed like a nail.

And even though his purple hipbones protested when he settled stomach-down into the mattress, it was the only position that didn’t tease that sensation back into existence.

So, he lied there. Still. Numb. Pretending that he didn’t taste the rancid flavors of flesh and fluids lingering on his tongue, or the feeling of something crusted over on the back of his wet thighs. He might have fallen back asleep, pretending this, but he couldn’t be sure. He only knew that there was that moment of silence, and aloneness, and then, that moment was gone, and a hand was roughly shaking his shoulder, drawing him out of whatever state he was in.

“Grub time, dog. Get up or you lose your share.”

Carl was slow to respond. It took him too long to process that he was being spoken to at all, and even longer to convince his aching body to adjust itself so that he could prop himself up on his forearms so that he was at least partially facing Joe. But there was no convincing his eyes to lift and meet the face that he knew was smirking, relaxed, unbothered, form casually sinking the far side of the bed as he sat down.

“I’ve gotta tell you boy, and this is true,” Joe began beside him, half-suppressing a laugh when Carl flinched as he went to touch his cheek. “That beaten bitch look is what caught my eye in the first place. You’re settin’ your tight little ass up to be mounted again. Hang me for a sheep as a lamb, I’ll do it, right now.”

Carl said nothing as he stared down at the black and white pattern on his pillow, stomach beginning to hurt, resisting the urge to flinch again when he felt Joe brush his knuckles against his temple, and lift his hand to comb fingers through his stringy damp hair— _petting_ him. The act was gentle but not without threat, and Carl had to close his eyes to it, his sore muscles tense throughout the entirety of the degrading touch that went on unnecessarily too long, licking his lips with the faint layer of spit in his painfully dry mouth to line the breaking red cracks.

“Dog,” Joe said suddenly, palm settling on the crown of his head, sneer burning like a brand into Carl’s skin. “Are you thirsty?”

Carl rolled his tongue, tasting no saliva, only the stale, putrid tang left behind by Joe’s body, and his brows slowly began to knit. His jaw languidly fell just enough for him to force a sound from his throat.

“Yes…”

“Good. Sit your ass up.”

Carl tried to swallow, and pressed his weight into his forearms to try and force his body upwards. Every nerve in his body instantly lit up. He grit his teeth as a wave of cold sweat slid down his skin, and he tenderly turned over onto his back, wrists trembling as his palms pushed into the mattress to slide him into a sitting position. His eyes watered with the strain, but he kept them cast down, avoiding Joe’s smirk at all cost as he tenderly settled himself.

“Good boy. Here,” Joe snickered quietly, tossing a clear plastic bottle of water at him. Carl snatched it before Joe could change his mind, unscrewed the cap, and without hesitation quickly began to take large, greedy gulps, overwhelming his throat and stomach.

He dropped the bottle just as he began to gag, water slipping back up his throat and spilling out of his mouth as his gut rejected it.

“Christ, you’d better watch that shit,” Joe snapped, suddenly reaching out and yanking his head back as Carl struggled not to choke. “Water’s precious in the new world, boy. Keep it down ‘cause you’re not gettin’ much more of it today.”

Carl stared up at the ceiling, taking short, sputtering breaths until he felt the water begin to slide down his throat, and his airway cleared.

And then, without warning, heat filled his face. He grimaced, closing his eyes. Tears began to spill down his cheeks.

And wordlessly, he cried.

He cried when Joe’s grip left his head.

He cried Joe tried to offer him food, and when a plastic spoon of black beans was crammed into his mouth when he rejected it.

He cried when Joe took the rag from the night before, dipped it into the pale with only a thin layer of dirty water in it, yanked back the sheets, and dug the abrasive cloth into the dried blood on his backside and thighs.

He cried until the numbness returned, gentle and cradling him, smelling like his mother, reading poems to him on a lawn chair in his front yard as he waited for his father to come home from work.

 


	4. to earthward

* * *

 

**_to earthward_ **

* * *

  
  
  
Carl had no memory of falling back asleep.

But he’d been somewhere quiet, listening to the tinkling sound of ice in a lemonade glass, feeling its cold sweat drip onto his skin as a gentle presence sipped from it, when the bedroom door opened, and heavy footsteps approached him.

His head lulled on his shoulders when their fingers came to gather him off the bed. They were rough. Reeked of fresh cigarette smoke when they touched his chin, and tried to get him to focus.

What little contact he maintained with the nerves in his limbs strained to keep him upright when the hands pulled him by the waist, dragging him to the edge of the mattress until the pads of his bare feet touched the floor. He then heard a familiar, crooning hum above him as the hands returned to his face, smelling like fresh nicotine and sweat, and the heat from their palms was suffocating.

On reflex, Carl tried to lift his arms and push them away.

He’d cried himself empty, and he couldn’t muster the energy to wallow in the sense memories that those hands brought about, that pulled him from the brown curls. The poetry book. The sound of a sheriff’s car on tarmac.

The humming continued.

Carl lethargically lifted his eyes as he felt the warm brush of knuckles along his cheek. He found Joe staring down at him, a cigarette pressed between his lips, vaguely amused as he pushed Carl’s hands away, and grazed the damp, tear-stained skin along Carl’s jaw. He slid his hand down to the curve of his throat.

Carl watched him, saw the minuscule twitches in the corners of his mouth as his palm opened and the tips of his fingers pressed into Carl’s neck, and Carl, on instinct, sucked in a breath.

He was trying to elicit a reaction, and it was working. It had only taken that light pressure, that reaffirmation of the dozens of threats before it, that Carl drifted from his daze and found himself, for the second time in days, sharply aware of where he was and who he was with.

“ _There’s_ my good little boy,” Joe sniggered.

Carl jerked back, and abruptly cried out when the sharp, invasive ache in his lower-body reintroduced itself like a knife. The pain bolted up his hips and into his spine, and he nearly tumbled off the bed as his shoulders reflexively lurched forward. His face subsequently collided with Joe’s hips, and was caught, a hand gripping the hair on the back of his head to draw him forward and hold him still.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa there,” Joe cooed through his cigarette, his brunt nails digging into Carl’s scalp. “Easy there. You’re shakin’ harder than Hiroshima, and my boys are gonna be feelin’ that shit all the way downstairs. Do yourself a favor. Take a breath.”

Carl closed his eyes, grimacing as his sweat-dampened temple was pressed into the fabric of Joe’s pants and another hand landed on bare his shoulder.

The nerves in his backside were biting like teeth and making every muscle in his body tremor. His head was spinning. He tried to focus on the hot palm on his shoulder and the fingers tangled uncomfortably in his hair, but that burrowing, raw heat was carving its place further and further into his insides the longer he sat upright, and he desperately needed to be back on his stomach.

His lips trembled trying to form words as sticky beads of perspiration slid down the side of his face. No sounds emerged.

“Alright, alright, take a breath. Take a breath. I get it,” Joe murmured, pressing Carl tight against his hip, steadying him. “I broke you in a little rough and left you a little stove up. Suck it up, because you’re gonna be feelin’ that for a while, and daylight’s got a time limit. You hearin’ me, boy?”

Carl felt sickness slip up the back of his throat when Joe began to slide the fingers from his hair down to the skin of his back, grazing it with an eerie gentleness that left goosebumps, and his peripherals began to go dark. He quickly tried to turn and dip his back away from it, but Joe’s hold suddenly tightened, and jerked him back into place, trapping him.

Carl went still.

 _“Kid, you’re going to be a bed warmer,”_ Billy’s hushed voice reminded him as Joe’s smoke-scented hand stroked his back. _“Do you really not get that by now?”_

He stared vacantly into the crook of Joe’s arm as he felt the pads of his fingers slip down along his spine. They trailed each trembling bump and the hollows in between, grazing the stiff muscles, and sliding down to the curve of his ribcage, where his torso had tensed to keep himself from vomiting. It was painfully affective, threatening to drag real, tender memories up from the darkness, and Carl, horrified, grabbed a fistful of the sheets to try and cover himself.

Joe wasn’t doing this to comfort him. He wasn’t being kind. He was doing it to watch him squirm. Still trying to garner a reaction. Still testing him. Playing with him. And Carl allowed it, frozen in place, not daring to try to move again as he bit back on his disgust.

After a moment, he felt Joe finally begin to pull away, and release a thick sigh.

“Alright, mongrel. Get your ass up and get dressed. It’s time we head out and find our next abode for the evening.”

Carl’s clenched stomach fluttered. He crossed his arms over himself and pressed the sheet into the sticky sweat on his chest, shoulders curving, trying to stifle the growing panic at being reminded that he was going to be taken with them. But not out of sympathy, and not out responsibility for what they did to his father. Joe was taking him with them to do what he did again. Maybe more times after that. Maybe not even just Joe would do it. Maybe they would even kill him, when they didn’t want to anymore.

He _couldn’t_ go with them.

“Joe…?” he asked after a long silence, and a longer hesitation, voice meek.

Joe’s head turned. His eyebrows raised. “Excuse me?”

Carl paused, suddenly feeling disoriented, his vision quaking. He pictured himself being pinned back-down into the dirt, thumbs on his throat, cutting off his air.

“Can I…” he tried, quiet and rasping. “… stay here…?”

There was a beat.

Then, Joe drew back to him.

For a moment, Carl thought Joe might hit him—so much so that he violently flinched when he reached out and simply touched his chin, and lifted his face.

“Now, why would you wanna do that?” Joe asked with a playful tinge in his voice that conflicted, frighteningly, with the intensity in his gaze.

Carl tried to turn his head as Joe leaned in. “I… I just—”

“I protected you from my boys. I let you bury your daddy. You have food in your belly ‘cause of me,” Joe murmured quietly, painfully tightening his grip on Carl’s chin. “And all I’ve been askin’ is that you know your place.”

Carl’s mouth opened and closed. His eyes fluttered between Joe’s restrained scowl, the threshold behind him, and the floorboards still speckled with his blood.

“Now, I don’t know what gave you the impression that I’ve been anythin’ short of sincere about the way my boys and I operate, but I’m sensin’ you need a refresher on the rules here,” Joe offered, composed, voice neutral, soft. He tapped the ash of his cigarette into the floorboards, and slipped his hand from Carl’s chin to gently pull his arm from his body. “You remember what you are?”

Carl numbly watched the cigarette butt draw close to his skin. He felt the heat of it as it lingered, centimeters away.

“If you don’t, and you need a reminder, then you should say it now,” Joe continued calmly. “Or… you can tell me you know your place. Tell me you understand.”

Carl stared at the gray tendrils that twisted in a coil up around Joe’s fingers, his chest hurting, the ache in his lower-body sharp and hot as his muscles went rigid. Without looking up, he swallowed, and lowly murmured, “I understand.”

“What are you?”

Burning specks of ash fell from the butt, touched his flesh. He licked his dry lips. Voice barely a whisper as his eyes unfocused.

“Your dog.”

“That’s right. That’s my smart boy,” Joe murmured with words like molasses. The hand gripping his arm adjusted, and he lightly massaged his thumb over the gooseflesh. “Because you’re so smart, I know that you’re really gonna be listenin’ to me when I tell you, that when we leave here, you’re gonna keep that mouth shut. You’re gonna take what I give you. You’re not gonna steal. You’re not gonna lie. You’re not gonna try to run, or pull that shit you pulled on me outside. Your only job is to be my good little boy.”

Carl watched Joe pull the searing tip of the cigarette away from his skin, eyes dropping when Joe released it to the floor and a boot crushed it into the wood, his mind blank, and his chest tight. Joe drew closer to him.

“You _are_ my boy, remember?” He felt Joe’s warm fingers slide down into the sheet and brush his bruised and tender hips. “You remember renouncin’ your daddy last night for me?”

He was becoming lightheaded. His throat was tingling.

Joe began to lean down into him, breath hot, nose grazing his ear. Carl looked past him, at the sneakers, the skateboard, the fireplace. A hand came too close to his inner thigh. His heart pounded.

He heard his own voice in the darkness. He felt fingers digging painfully into his neck and cramming his face against the sheets. A weight was crushing him. He was exposed, disgraced, and nearly gagging on self-hatred as he denied his father for the man that was on top of him.

And as he sat there, the humid, death-scented mid-morning air building up sweat on his back, Carl’s face suddenly blanched.

Without warning, he pivoted away from Joe’s body, lurched over, and vomited onto the floor.

 

* * *

  
  
  
When he descended the stairs, stiff and limping, fingers trying to grip the banister for support as he trailed the ambling body in front of him, Carl felt eyes. But he didn’t look up.

He was lead into the living room, arms pulled to the front of his body by a mountain climbing rope tied in a lark’s head knot around his wrists, a thin dribble of spit still in the corner of his mouth, and his glassy, dulled gaze lowered.

Blurry black shadows on the floor slipped on the outskirts of his peripherals, and the blunt, echoing sound of voices drifted in and out of his ears as the strangers spoke, gathered their things, checked their weapons, but nothing was clear or distinct. Only once did he react to any of them, when one of the strangers’ hands snaked out and obscenely brushed the denim over his crotch as they were passing, but Carl did little more than glance up and catch the look on the heavy-set man’s face as he headed toward the dining room.

The man had his finger to his lips, _shh_ ’ing him, sneering, before he disappeared. Immediately after, Carl dropped his head again, and adjusted his arms to protect himself, his empty stomach twisting.

 _“Dan, the big man, he’s been wanting something… to bury himself in for weeks…”_ Joe’s voice had fragmentally muttered inside him. _“… no self-control… would’ve… split you down the middle…”_

Carl’s face burned. He tried turn his body further to the side, and not think of this as he vacantly stared at his bound wrists over his groin and the bits of dried blood under his nails, waiting for the time to come when the rope would pull outward and lead him out the front door.

He’d avoided looking at the space where his father’s body had been. He’d avoided meeting any of the eyes boring into him with curiosity, the knowledge of what he’d done and what had been done to him sitting on his skin like a pheromone. Most of all, he’d avoided the heavy, painful sadness willing his body down into the floor as he remembered, that only a little more than a day ago, he’d been someone’s son. Days before that, he’d had friends. A family.

And now he was alone.

The rope lifted. Carl heard the _clink_ of the carabiner at the end of the lead as it was adjusted, and the rope tugged his arms straight when his legs didn’t respond. It nearly dragged him out through the cockeyed door he remembered running through, beyond the porch he’d stopped short of with cans of food at his feet, past the spot where he’d frozen in place when he’d realized someone had broken in.

As he was led away from the bungalow, Carl looked over at the unmarked grave carved into the grass, and strained to turn his head back to watch it slowly disappear behind him, the last of his father’s presence diminishing until there was only empty air.

Carl pictured his face. The feeling of his hand on the back of his neck. And when he was pulled out onto the dirty, sun-beaten tarmac, into the bright, hot world by his wrists, away from the last remaining tangible existence of his father, Carl felt the weight of that sadness sink into him so profoundly, he nearly hit the ground.

But just as his legs began to go weak, someone came up behind him, and gently placed something on his head.

His eyes tore up. Caught the dark rim of his sheriff’s hat. Saw Billy breeze by him, heading for the front of the group.

Carl watched him, confused, breath tangled in the sob that had been sitting in the back of his throat. His glassy eyes narrowed. Slowly, he adjusted himself, straightening his limp to walk forward just enough to give his hands leeway to touch the brim, feeling the fabric, and grazing the points of the metal band with the tips of his fingers.

He looked up at Billy, who trekked ahead of the others with a rifle hooked over his shoulders, and who didn’t look back.

Carl’s hands fell. His hobbling gait drifted him back to the end of the lead again, and his gaze fell downward.

_Miles to go._

 

* * *

  
  
  
“Hey, little man…”

They’d been walking for hours when Carl heard a voice whisper at his side.

He was unable look up, the back of his neck aching and straining as it was just to hold the weight of his hanging head on his shoulders, but he did manage to shift his eyes to catch a pair of hiking boots, and a lanky shadow cast over his path.

Carl swallowed, and very carefully tried to meander his body away from them.

He didn’t know how much longer he could do this. The nerves in his backside were abrading his insides like sandpaper. His arms and legs were burning from being yanked, tugged, dragged for miles on the hard surface of the pavement, and eventually, to the uneven plain of dry dirt that led to the train tracks. But it was the thick, humid air, and his own dehydration, that was weighing his body down into an ugly hunch, and pulling it closer and closer to the ground.

Carl kept his gaze lowered, sweat dripping into his eyelashes as he silently prayed for Billy to just go away. He’d been lucky enough to have been mostly left alone up until then, catching only a few glances back in his direction, a few murmurs, and Dan, whose boldness made his skin crawl, dropping to the tail end of the group, walking directly behind him, just staring. But no one had spoken directly to him. Not until now.

“Little man,” he heard Billy repeat quietly. “Hey. You okay?”

Carl twisted his blistered fingers over the rope and tried to pull himself forward, putting as much distance between himself and Billy as he could manage, and when that proved to be ineffective, he turned his head altogether.

When a moment passed and still Billy did not leave his side, Carl allowed his head to rest there, chin pressed to his elevated upper-arm as he stared grimly at the field of pale, dead grass near the train tracks.

“We’re going to break soon,” Billy whispered, nudging him slightly with his elbow. “Joe should be giving you some food and water. Just keep your head up.”

Carl’s hands strained against the rope to form fists, but he said nothing.

He watched a group of crows cluster over something motionless in the grass. A buzzing sound erupted as a patch of flies tore from it when the birds began to squawk. And then there was a rust-colored barn several yards away, and a walker, tiny, gray-skinned and emaciated, stumbling lamely around it with its neck twisted at an impossible angle.

It was a kid. And as it wandered, aimless and alone around a dilapidated wheelbarrow, Carl pictured himself being crushed into the dirt, fingers pressing into his throat until he disappeared, and his body was left to roam. He wondered how long it would be until it came apart. He wondered if someone would puncture his brain. He wondered if he would feel it when it happened.

He wondered if his eyes would be empty.

Carl’s jaw tightened suddenly. His knuckles went white as he slowly lifted his head, and forced his gaze upward.

“You wanted to kill me.”

Silence.

Carl stared straight ahead, the rope digging into his wrists and imprinting a pattern into the wet, swollen skin, tears beginning to prick is eyes at the weight of the quiet that followed. He listened to the sound of their footsteps in the powdery dirt and the crunch of gravel as they stepped onto the train tracks, biting into his dry lips, needing Billy to deny it. But, the dead air that had settled between them was thick, and Carl was already fighting a pressure building in his chest and throat before so much as a word had been spoken.

“Yeah…” Billy finally, quietly murmured. “Yeah, I did.”

“Why?” Carl rasped sharply.

“I thought it’d be better.”

Carl swallowed. His eyes flickered between the backs of the strangers and horizon beyond them, confused, words catching in his throat as he tried to process this. Then, his fists began to tighten into his restraints, knuckles clenching as he managed to growl out, “You’re a liar.”

“What?”

“You’re a goddamn liar,” Carl swore, his frustration bubbling over into a quiet rage. “You said I had to survive. You told me to do what I had to. You told me that crap about ‘not going gentle,’ and then I find out you wanted to _kill_ me. You’re an _asshole_.”

He heard Billy pause. Then there was a low, nearly soundless sigh as he fell back a bit behind him, the head of his shadow receding just short of Carl’s heels when Joe shot a brief glance in their direction. Billy waited patiently for him turn back around before muttering, “Well… to be honest, I was still planning on taking you out last night.”

Carl’s eyes widened. “You what…?”

“I’d soaked that hard-candy in enough anti-freeze to turn your stomach inside out,” Billy murmured, almost nonchalantly. “It wouldn’t have been enough to kill you or anything, but, it would’ve made you sick enough for Joe to let me do it.”

Carl felt his blood run cold. He stared absently at his blistered hands, vision beginning to blur, heart beginning to pound, as his jumbled and eerily vague memories from the night before grappled with Billy’s words. In the subsequent silence, he struggled to find his voice, and when he did, it emerged something short of a whisper, a mere croak that barely formed syllables at all as it slipped from his painfully dry throat.

“Why… didn’t you…?”

Billy just shrugged. “I don’t know. You wouldn’t take it.”

Carl sucked in a breath.

He was still for a moment. Then he tentatively turned to rest his chin back on his arm, trying to hide the horrified look on his face, staring over at the little walker. He heard Billy’s pace meet his, and the sound of his boots crunching into the gravel at his side, and caught a breeze-light whisper of, “Little man?” before he snapped,

“Stay away from me.”

and he forced his aching back to straighten, his burning, unsteady legs to increase their pace, and his gaze to turn and remain forward, every inch of him ice cold in the scorching heat as he tried to put as much distance between himself and Billy as he possibly could.

 

* * *

  
  
  
It was dusk when the group found a place to rest for the night.

Harley, the man who’d initially given him the shovel to bury his dad the morning before, had led them off the tracks and into a patch of wood when he discovered a fresh trail of food wrappers. There’d been a deserted campsite buried in a nearby clearing that still had a functioning fire pit, a nylon tent, and a torn backpack with bloodstained clothes scattered all over the dirt. Anything that seemed even remotely valuable—gloves, a flashlight, shoelaces, matchsticks—was descended on and “claimed” so rapidly and so aggressively that Carl didn’t even have time to get out of the way before someone nearly shoved him into the ground trying to get to it.

Joe found a small, wrinkled button-up shirt, stained with its own running blue dye that was roughly Carl’s size, and Joe threw it at him as he was standing at the base of a tree, trying to stay out of the others’ way.

Carl clutched it, and carefully, awkwardly, lowered himself against the tree trunk, knees hitched under him to keep pressure off his backside. He watched as a fight broke out between Tony and Harley over a dented steel thermos they found in some brush. Dan and Billy were on the fringes of the clearing and laughing at them, while Joe was still gripping Carl’s lead, back against a tree, watching with a smirk on his face.

Carl’s fists were shaking into the shirt Joe gave him, his entire body in a fit from trying to keep up with the momentum of the others all day, and his shoulders stiff with apprehension as he remained as far from them as he could manage on the lead. He had to fight to keep from flinching every time he heard the word “claimed,” every time skin connected with skin in the quiet of the woods.

He was trying not to picture the moment Joe had come through the front door with his bag full of food. He was trying not to feel his father’s warm neck on his face, or hear the sounds the strangers made when they fought over the cans—the shouting, punching, the creak of the wood under their weight. But he was. And he hardly noticed when a mountain of a body appeared in front of him.

“Don’t move.”

Carl jolted, back colliding with the tree and his arms springing up to defend himself.

The stranger laughed. He felt them grab hold of his wrists and the end of the rope, giving it one sharp jerk to bring his forearms down, and Carl cried out. The shirt slipped from his crimped fingers.

“Hey, easy!” he heard Joe shout from a distance. “I said to anchor the bitch, not beat her!”

Carl trembled harshly into the stranger’s grasp, panic creeping into his senses as he dug his shoulder blades into the rough bark behind him and tried not to meet the stranger’s eyes. One thick, square, sun-burnt hand was gripping his wrists together, the other was pooling the long end of the lead from the dirt. They shifted and tugged at the knot, painfully grinding the abrasive nylon into Carl’s skin until Carl made another sound—a low, short cry that he felt, for some reason, he had to keep Joe from hearing.

“I like watchin’ that mouth open,” a rumbling, chest-deep voice snickered under their breath as they gathered the last of the rope. “How many cans of food d’you think that mouth’s worth to Joe?”

Carl grimaced, the color leaving his face as the stranger laughed again and adjusted their hold on his wrists, and their free hand began to rework the knot.

They briefly untied it and then looped the rope back over his wrists, creating a knot Shane had never taught him, one that was pulled into the skin between his thumbs and across his palms, then tied into an additional, unrecognizable set of knots just at the base of his hands.

Carl watched the stranger work, wincing with each bite of the rope, his heart thumping uncomfortably in his chest as he tried to ignore the smell of the stranger’s breath on his cheek. He was careful to watch their wandering fingers. Knew that when they slipped from the rope and found his elbow, his upper-arm, his chin, at one point, that it was no accident, and the cruel snickers when he tried to pull away, even when he tried to find Joe amongst the faces and brush, only made him feel more helpless and disgusted.

It was only when the stranger finally began to pull away that something occurred to him.

Carl froze. His brows furrowed.

The stranger’s wide, patchy hands were checking the final knot, giving it one last tug, and as they did so, Carl noticed the way the muscles in them flexed, and the way the green veins in them pressed into their flesh. There was something familiar about it. Something visceral. Something important.

Carl frowned. Slowly, he dragged his eyes up the stranger’s wide forearms, up the black cloth of their shirt, past the draping brown pocket of their vest that weighed down with a bullet magazine, and finally, up to the round face that was lowered, a smirk tugging at the corners of their mouth.

Carl stared, unwavering, fighting a faint tremble of adrenaline and the heat of a rage that would put him in danger if he let it surface.

His breaths became more rapid. The stranger looked up.

Their eyes locked.

Lou paused. A look of knowing passed over his face. And the world seemed to go quiet.

Carl could hear his own frantic heartbeat, the _click_ of his chattering teeth being ground down. He heard every minor shift in the dirt under their weight, every snap of a stick, crunch of a rock. Everything was tiny, and loud, and significant, and overwhelming, and building, and Lou’s smirk was blooming across his face faster than Carl’s fevered mind was processing it, and he was struggling to control himself.

_“You leave him be! Leave him be!”_

Carl watched Lou slowly tilt his head. He saw him lift one of his hands, and bring his index finger to Carl’s temple.

_“It was me— _just_ me! Let him go!”_

Carl was back in the living room, knife to his throat, hearing his father scream.

_“You take care of your daddy for me.”_

He was watching a hand press against the side of his father’s head, and another, the same one level with his own, lift a knife. Bring it to his father’s temple.

_“Hurry up. Do it. Do it. Do it. Hurry. Get it over with. Do it.”_

He saw the knife go in just as he felt Lou jab him in his own.

Hard.

Hard enough to shove his head to the side, and make the world slant, and send him tumbling onto the hardwood floor where everything would be sideways and quiet and his mother was there and it was blue and smelled like blood and he had broken his promise to her but she was dead too and not really there and so it was just the blue and the quiet and the void and then there were boots and then he—

Lou jabbed him again.

The third time, Carl snapped.

“I’m gonna kill you.”

Lou’s face dropped. His brows lowered.

They stared at one another, neither willing to break eye-contact, Carl’s fists still clenched into the restraints, Lou’s finger still lingering near his temple.

Then, without warning, Lou’s large hands suddenly thrust outward and grabbed Carl roughly by the forearms, thumbs digging into his skin as he snarled out, “The hell d’you just say!? D’you just _threaten_ me, you little shit!?”

Lou shoved him back against the tree, forcing his lower-back to arch against the pressure, and Carl cried out as the raw nerves in his body burst with a white-hot heat that rippled along his insides. He felt that filing sensation, that invasive burn drive itself from his lower-back to the base of his neck, and it was all he could do not scream as Lou’s fingers dug his torso into the bark at an angle.

Quickly, he tried to bring his arms up to try to push the mountain away from him, desperate just to stop the pain, when something caught the lead on his restraints, and yanked, hard.

Carl’s arms snapped outward. He hit the ground and was subsequently pinned to it, hat thrown off, face pressed into the dirt, crying out in pain and frustration as that feeling, that severe heat that burrowed and cut, thrust him back to the night before. The hand on his neck. Being pushed down.

Carl’s rage dissipated. His shoulders shook. He began to hyperventilate.

He blearily tried to look up through his wet bangs, breath hitching in short, rapid gasps, cheek scraping on the rough terrain as a thin, bearded face looked down at him. A stranger whose name he didn’t know. They were pressing their knee into the small of his back, and grasping a fistful of his hair so tight that it brought tears to his eyes.

Carl was panting into the soil, shuddering under the weight on top of him, when he caught a glint of silver in the corner of his eye. The stranger brandished it near his face. Hovered the point just under his jaw as he pulled back on his hair, and forced his neck to arch.

Carl’s vision blurred. He looked up at the sky through the clusters of the brown pines, the stranger’s face becoming a formless black shadow on the outskirts of his vision as the tip drew in, and touched his flesh. The forest stared down at him.

_The woods are lovely, dark and deep._

His breath steadied. His dirtied lips parted as a withheld sob slid up his throat.

“Well, this ain’t exactly straight what’s happenin’ here, Len,” Joe’s sing-song voice suddenly came to the fore; a chilling, piercing, vacuum of a sound.

“Joe—“

“Hold up. Think about what you wanna say,” Carl heard Joe croon as he sauntered closer. “Don’t let your mouth overload your tail. You might end up in an unfavorable position, and I ain’t fixin’ to lose another gent to stupidity.”

The hand in Carl’s hair loosened. He let his cheek slide back down onto the ground, but kept his gaze upward.

“Ya hear what your whelp said to Lou?” The stranger, Len, shot back. “Ya hear it threaten him?”

“I heard the sound of hands where they don’t belong.”

Carl felt the stranger step away from him, boots crunching on stones and twigs near the crown of his head, frustration building in their voice.

“C’mon, Joe. That ain’t fair. Just ‘cause it’s a bed warmer don’t mean the rules don’t apply to it.”

“See, I don’t disagree with that. But if someone’s going to be shutting a yappy mouth, it sure as shit ain’t gonna be one of my boys. That ain’t your right,” Joe announced, raising his voice, filling the glade with warning. “If the bitch nips or bites or gives you _any_ reason to think she needs to be jerked bald, you come to me. And depending on the general mood of the day, maybe you get rewarded for it. But you sure as shit don’t deliver no corrections or stick it without my permission.”

Carl’s brows knit, confused. His unfocused eyes flittered from the tips of the pines to blue of the sky, his heartbeat uneven. He was waiting for someone else to speak. For something else to happen. He expected Len, whose boots were so near his head that their heels brushed his scalp when they shifted, to reach back down and plunge the knife in his throat regardless, and had to keep his bound hands tucked under him to hide their shaking.

But Len, instead, relented. He made a “ _tsch_ ” sound under his breath before casting an intense, irritated glance that Carl caught in his peripherals. And then, he stormed away.

Carl didn’t see watch to see where he went. He kept still on the ground, gut twisted, listening to the sound of footprints in the dirt as the group slowly resumed pilfering what was left of the campsite.

His eyes only lowered from the trees when one familiar pair of boots stepped in front of his face. Worn. Black. Still spotted with dried blood on their soles.

“You know what I gotta do now, right?”

Carl’s face went slack. He paused, then slowly pulled his red, trembling hands out from under him, and, truly hating himself, offered them outward.

Joe wasted no time in grabbing the lead and yanking him up into one of his arms, then hooked his waist just as he began to stumble. He proceeded to half-carry, half-drag Carl away from the campsite, down an uneven path and led them too far from the others and too deep into the thicket.

As the clearing disappeared behind them, Carl, knowing what was to come, began to feel that panicked, weepy delirium creeping back into his senses. Blinding him. Stupefying him. Keeping him from catching the bits and pieces of rotting flesh speckling the brush. The bloodied clothing. The distant, raspy hiss of the dead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I deeply, sincerely apologize for how late this chapter is. Writer's block is absolute murder.


	5. ouroboros (pt. 1)

* * *

     

**_ouroboros (pt. 1)_ **

* * *

  
  
  
The farm lands in the area surrounding the train tracks had been home to livestock and fruit gardens. It was their first morning at the campsite when Billy left with Harley to scour for what had been left of them, and came back with a chunk of flesh missing from his ankle bone.

The perimeters of the old animal pens had been littered with mostly broken and useless wolf traps, but a functioning one caught Billy outside of an empty chicken coop when he’d gone looking for feed. When Harley had brought him back, Carl heard him tell Joe that they’d seen several escaped pigs in the boundaries of the woods as they were returning. The meat, he said, would attract more “rotters.”

But until Billy healed, the group was stagnated.

Carl had been kept isolated in the tent after that first day, when Joe had carried him back from the privacy of the cramped clearing a quarter mile from the firepit, where he’d been beaten so badly he couldn’t walk back on his own. He’d been concussed, dizzy, and partially sobbing, partially choking on the blood that was still rolling down his throat from the nose that had caught the tip of Joe’s boot, when Joe had come for him again that night. His old shirt had been used as a gag. He remembered thinking he could still smell his dad somewhere on it.

His days were spent safely alone, in a numb, fugue-like state, left to lie on his stomach with his arms bound and listening to the others come to Joe with things like cellophane-wrapped pastries, soda, and candy bars, trying to get in. But the only times the tent flap opened was when Joe was coming in in the dead of night, or when Carl, who was dirty, limping, and smelling like sweat and fluids, was being led out to clean himself at the dawn of morning.

It was for the latter reason that Carl found himself standing naked in a creek with the babbling water up to his knees, and his own gun trained on him from the stony outskirt.

His head was lowered as he drew one of the coarse, blood-stained rags from the bungalow up the length of his legs, watching the clouded rivulets that slid down his skin. The core of a mottled green apple and an empty paper cup Joe had thrown into the water bobbed by his feet. He was pretending not to notice them, just as he was pretending not to notice the cramp of his empty stomach as they passed.

Billy’s injury had instigated a wave of agitation and anxiety within the group that only ended when Len convinced Joe to trade the rations he “wasted” on Carl in exchange for continued use of the tent. It was that, or as Joe had later put it, “things would go Darwin.”

Eventually Tony returned from a run with a wilted cardboard box containing an assortment of canned goods and fruit, but the agreement had already been made. If Joe wanted Carl fed, he’d either have to give up the tent, or give up what scraps were leftover from his own meals.

He didn’t give up the tent. So Carl went on little, or without.

“Hey! Dog!”

Carl jumped. The rag he hadn’t realized had drifted down to the tips of his fingers slipped, and he panicked and quickly tumbled into the water after it. His knees _cracked_ on the stone bed. From the bank, Joe bellowed with laughter, and Carl sensed the gun following him as he blindly hooked his nails into the rag just as it was traveling out of reach.

“I was gonna tell you to move your ass, but it looks like you’re movin’ just fine!” Joe shouted, still laughing as Carl winced and pulled himself back onto his knees. “Now get up! You’re takin’ as long as a month of fuckin’ Sundays, and I’ve got business to attend to that doesn’t involve sitting here watchin’ your brain cells die.”

Carl weakly nodded without looking back, but he made no immediate attempt to stand.

He instead looked down at the rocks wobbling beneath the surface of the water as his knees throbbed. His hands, still trembling from the rush of adrenaline, gripped the rough cloth against his chest.

The cool creek was comforting on his bruised skin. It was unbearably kind at a time when he felt like he didn’t deserve it. Faint, murky wisps of pink were sliding passed his aching knees from behind his thighs, and his tired face, marred by the scratches left in his cheek from being pushed into the dirt, stared sullenly back at him as he watched the filth disappear into the stream.

No one had ever taught him about this.

“Dog!”

Carl flinched and glanced back, where Joe’s eyes were still boring holes into his skin and a free hand was motioning for him to stand. He hesitated only for a moment, fixating on the barrel of the revolver that was still aimed at him, before gingerly attempting to rise from the water—only to promptly stop again when he caught someone emerging from the woods.

It was Harley. His short hair was tousled from sleep and he was adjusting the rifle he’d slung over his shoulder.

Carl, suddenly aware of how exposed he was, quickly hunched back down into the water. He apprehensively watched Joe offer him an irritated look before turning to Harley, knowing that this wasn’t part of the routine, that the few times someone had been awake when they’d left, that person knew not to follow them. Carl’s brows knit as he tried to make out what they were saying, and he sharply averted his eyes when he caught Harley looking at him.

 _Just go away,_ he thought, his face beginning to burn. _Please, please, just go away._

He didn’t.

Harley and Joe stood, for what felt like entirely too long, conversing lowly on the edge of the creek and casting the occasional glance in Carl’s direction that was sensed rather than seen. The worry on Carl’s face was clear on the surface of the sloshing water as he waited, crouched as low as he could manage with his arms and the rag hooked around his waist, the skin from his forehead to his shoulders red with humiliation.

He tried to focus on the sound of the water quietly splashing against the stones. The color of the morning sun. The pungent, earthy smells of grass and ferns. Anything but them.

Then, suddenly, there was a sharp, silence-cutting _caw_ that startled Carl from his train of thought. His head jerked to the bank on his right.

A fat, black crow was standing on a boulder with its beak cocked. The bulb of its head was twitching from side-to-side, and its feet were restlessly adjusting on the stone as its black eyes darted between Carl’s hunched form, and a dirt path that cut through a cluster of trees on its side of the shore. Carl frowned slightly. He watched it nervously bat its wings several times, meander from one end of the boulder to the other, and _caw_ again as its beak lifted in the direction of the path.

His eyes narrowed when he saw movement.

Something staggered out.

“Dog!”

Carl barely had time to register what it was before his back had slammed into the water, and a body was on top of him.

He instinctively threw his hands up when a gnashing, rotted face plunged toward his neck. His fingers connected with a brittle chest, he felt its sternum crack, and his palms immediately began to get swallowed up into the walker’s decaying breast.

Carl shrieked in disgust. He gaped up at the frantic, milky eyes tearing from the flesh of his cheeks, to his nose, to his jaw, its teeth snapping every which way as its chest slid through the blunt pressure of Carl’s hands. The coagulated, jelly-like substance of its blood and muscle squished obscenely on his fingers, and he saw it begin to travel like thick syrup down his arms, but he couldn’t move. The walker was shoving him downward, threatening to drown him in the shallow creek as it snapped at his face.

He felt one of its knobby knees jam into his leg, pinning him to the bedrock. Water filled his ears. His hands began to scramble inside the creature’s sunken chest in a panicked attempt to find leverage, but it was only getting closer, and he could smell the putrid air from its insides even as he breathlessly sputtered against the current.

Carl was becoming lightheaded. His eyes began to fog as the walker’s body continued to swallow his palms. He felt his head sink further and further beneath the surface to avoid the gaping maw gnashing inches from his skin, sinking until he was fully submerged, and he could no longer breathe.

His wrists had just begun to go weak when suddenly, the walker stopped thrashing against him.

Its broken chest cavity was yanked out of his hands. Its body crashed into the water next to him, and its viscous blood began to fill the stream just as a hand roughly grabbed hold of Carl’s forearm, and jerked him above the surface.

Carl gasped.

He reeled forward, heart racing, heaving for air and gagging up creek water when the fingers digging into his arm abruptly released him. There was laughter. The sound of sloshing behind him as someone else approached, and then a hand on his head, tousling his soaked hair.

“I told ya Joe, they’re gettin’ closer.”

Carl blearily dragged his eyes upward. Harley was a wet blur standing over him, the integral bayonet of his rifle smeared with congealed blood. His expression was unreadable, bordering on sour, and his gaze was averted from Carl’s naked body as Joe stood with a hand possessively planted on the crown of Carl’s head.

“You ain’t lyin’, but that was still unexpected,” Joe sneered, an edge in his voice as Harley took a slight, unbothered step back. “Good thing you bounded off like a jackrabbit with its ass on fire or I might’ve lost my claim.” He looked down. Nudged Carl with his knee. “You’d be rotter bait if it wasn’t for Harley, boy. What do you say?”

Carl stared up at him. He carefully crossed his arms beneath the water, and allowed his eyes to wearily travel from Joe’s upturned lips, to the vaguely cantankerous look on Harley’s face, and finally, to the walker at his side, lying face-down in the creek with a plumb-colored puncture wound in the back of its skull. It was small-framed, with its head twisted and floating lopsided on its shoulders.

Carl blinked back the water on his lashes, his brows furrowing, stomach sinking.

It was the little boy he’d seen wandering near the train tracks.

“Dog,” Joe barked, nudging him harder. “ _What_ do you say?”

Carl didn’t look up. He barely heard the words leave his mouth as he watched the small walker bob in the current.

“Thank you...”

 

* * *

 

Carl was woken by the sensation of being rolled onto his stomach. He winced when his scarred cheek was pressed into the abrasive nylon of the tent’s floor.

The clasp of his belt was released, and a hand quickly pulled his zipper. Another hand gripped at his hips to elevate them. Joe’s movements fumbled slightly and it took him more than a single try to unbutton his jeans, but the lukewarm air on his skin still made Carl release a groggy, quiet, miserable cry.

“Relax, relax, relax, that’s a good boy…” Lips pressed into the nape of his neck. Fingers caressed his torso under his draping shirt. “Relax… See, you’re being such a good boy...”

The air around Joe was thick with a pervasive vinegar-like smell. His breath made Carl grimace.

Carl had caught one of the strangers talking about raiding a farmhouse in the distance that had a cupboard full of home-brewed alcohols. They’d brought back crates of brown bottles and glass mason jars, and had taken to drinking around the fire at night. The inebriation made Joe dull, and soft. His touches had less deliberate cruelty behind them. His words, for better or worse, were more sincere. And it made Carl’s flesh crawl.

“Relax… Tonight’s your lucky night,” Joe exhaled into the back of his ear, face nestled in his hair as stray tears began to slide into the nylon under Carl’s face. “Stop your whimperin’, and listen. After that shit today, I decided that I’m gonna give my good little boy the gift of self-realization. Personal growth and all that. You hearin’ me?”

Carl felt Joe adjust behind him. The pad of a finger slid under his shirt, tracing the hollows of his shoulder blades until he shivered, and hesitantly nodded.

“Good. See, you’re gonna be givin’ a choice of one of two things, and as far as I’m concerned there ain’t gonna be no right or wrong answer, but you’re definitely gonna be feelin’ the effects of one…” The finger on his back slipped down his spine and along the scratches left from the bedrock. It drifted down into the groove of his backside.

Joe’s opposite hand ghosted the curve of his hip, and Carl felt a warm curl in his belly when a thumb drew inches from his groin.

“I’m gonna be wantin’ to hear you whine tonight, boy. Like a bitch in heat. I want you to say you want it. No wailin’ and cryin’, and no lyin’ there like a dead fish. I’m gonna make it good, and you’re gonna be a thankful, active participant. That’s option one.”

Carl’s eyes widened, and he uttered a low, dismal moan into the tent’s floor. He shook his head until he felt nails dig painfully into his hipbone.

“Your second option, and you’re gonna like this,” Joe slurred above him, holding him in place when he tried to pull away. “I’m gonna fuck you raw, and you’re gonna call me _daddy_ while I do it.”

Carl froze. His skin went gray.

The finger behind his legs trailed down to his entrance, and began to apply pressure. A fingernail breached him, and his waist tensed.

“So, what’s gonna be?” Joe murmured as Carl stared numbly into the bright fabric under his forehead, mind blank, stomach coiling. There was a lull in the pressure behind him. A hand sticky with sweat clumsily drifted down to the fold of his inner-thigh, and began to knead the skin. “Does my little boy wanna call me daddy? Or do you wanna be a good little dog and give me a whine?”

Carl’s eyes flittered against the floor. Tears dripped down into his rhythmically parting and closing lips as he tried to speak.

Joe noticed them. He slipped his finger from Carl’s body, and placed both palms on his hips as he leaned down onto him, crushing his bound hands, teeth trailing the lesions on the tips of his ears, voice nauseatingly soft as he whispered, “Hey, hey, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa… What did I say about that whimperin’? That’s not somethin’ I wanna hear tonight… I can make it good. It’s doesn’t have to hurt. I can take off these restraints, prep you like a _gentleman_ ,” he breathed into his ear, nipped the lobe, “and give you an experience you never would’ve had otherwise. You just gotta say you want it. Tell me you want it.”

Carl burrowed his face into the nylon, his gruesomely white skin slowly turning burgundy.

A chasm was opening in his gut. On some level, though he barely understood what it was that had been happening to him up to that point, what all of it meant in the grand scheme of his life, of defining who he was, he knew that he was about to cross a line he couldn’t come back from.

But the thought of calling Joe “daddy” was beyond anything he could bear.

He wouldn’t do it.

“… want it…”

“Try that again.”

Carl released a shaky breath. Shame and disgust crept up his damp back, and his voice broke when he very, very quietly murmured, “… I want it...”

Joe snickered into the shell of his ear. He paused long enough to sink his teeth into the helix one last time before pulling back, and beginning to untie Carl’s arms from the painful, partial reverse prayer on his spine. Carl was silent. He waited, dully staring into the ground, spiritless until the chew of the rope eased away, and his arms limply fell to his sides.

He then pulled them close to him, wincing against the ache, turning his abrasion-marked cheek to the side.

“Don’t ever tell me I ain’t a reasonable man. That’s another favor you owe me.”

Carl said nothing. He instead closed his eyes and bit down on his jaw when he felt Joe’s chest press back down against him, the naked skin scorching through the thin fabric of his shirt, and the fingers on his thigh massaged into the muscles inches from the terrifyingly sensitive flesh of his own body.

They brushed him. Faintly. But immediately, his eyes snapped back open. His hands fisted into the fabric. He stopped breathing.

He felt that coil of warmth in his stomach bloom.

“Y’know, I would’ve preferred a girl,” Joe slurred suddenly, his breath sickly sweet, almost burning with a chemical odor as he leaned down and pressed his lips to Carl’s neck. “Some pretty thing with tits. A wet little pussy. Instead, the new world saw fit to leave me a mangy boy with a little prick and a tight ass. And boy, you’re lucky you’re so tight.” His hand slid back up between them. Returned to his entrance. “But I’m a man of my word. And because you want it so bad, I’m gonna help you out with that.” He paused. Began to press. “Hold still.”

Carl tensed. His back arched as his mouth parted against the ground.

Joe eased the dry pad of his finger into him until Carl felt the blunt prod of a knuckle grazing his nerves. There was a flicker of pain, a snap of heat that made him hiss into a gathering puddle of drool under his chin, but Joe immediately went still, and patiently began to stroke his opposite hand along Carl’s thigh.

Carl’s waist shuddered. He palmed and clenched at the floor as Joe’s face settled back into the side of his neck, and teeth nipped at his jaw.

For a long moment, neither of them moved.

Then, Joe carefully began to withdraw his hand, slipping his curled finger back as Carl ground his forehead into the nylon and spit dripped from his grimacing mouth. A moment later, he thrust his finger back in. Pulled back. Thrusted in. Inserted another, that grazed his scars, stretched him. By the third, Carl’s stomach was tightening painfully, and tears were building back up in his glazed eyes. His flushed face contorted with each thrust and each rapid, shallow, wet burst of breath that broke from his throat, and another desperate plea for Joe to stop was building in his chest.

But then he felt Joe’s other hand slide up the inside of his leg, and a sudden, pleasant burst of static consumed the inside of his head.

His hips twitched. A sound he didn’t recognize sound fell from his lips.

Carl’s eyes opened wide. He felt the noxious burn of Joe’s breath on his neck as laughter touched the tent. Fingers dipped back into his insides, and remained there, stagnant, as a warm palm pressed between his legs.

“Like a bitch in heat.”

Carl licked his lips. Stared at nothing when he felt himself being stroked, and a mellow hum filled his ears. He tried to swallow. Keep breathing. Not think about what was happening. But his waist was hitching into the damp heat instinctively. His hips had begun rocking into the pressure inside of him that his body was coming to accept, and seemingly seek out, without his knowledge.

Mortified, Carl slowly, shakily, tried to push himself up on his forearms.

His dazed eyes aimlessly scanned the wall of the tent. Looking for a way out he wasn’t going to take. A place to crawl to that his body, twisting into Joe’s hands, wouldn’t.

His mouth opened to say something—Beg him to stop? Tell him to keep going?—when Joe sharply pulled his fingers back, and drove them back in. Deep. Until Carl felt every hot knuckle pressed against him. Until his forehead plunged back into the floor. Until Joe’s fingers stroked something that made his insides tremble and spasm as every muscle, from his knees to his abdomen, flooded with a gratifying warmth. The sensation only lasted for a moment. But the instant it passed, Carl fell apart.

“Hey, hey… Shh, shh, easy there, easy there,” Joe shushed drunkenly, cuddling against Carl’s tear-streaked face, nuzzling the tip of his nose into his ear as Carl loudly sobbed and tried to turn away. The hand between his legs grasped him again, gently stroking the flesh in a continuing rhythm until Carl’s weeping subsided, and he spiraled.

He began to make horrified and euphoric sounds that were sopping with saliva and mucus with every touch. His waist impulsively bucked back when Joe dragged his fingers out of him. And when he sensed Joe’s body adjust, the tip of his shaft lining up with his hips, he didn’t tense, didn’t try to get away.

The pulsing burn instantly drove his insides to clench, his head to fall back, and his mouth to drop open. He arched his neck until he felt the sticky skin of Joe’s shoulder in his hair, and the flat of hand a reach up and push into his forehead as he blindly began to paw at the floor in some vague attempt to escape. When it failed to still him, the sweat-moistened palm slipped back between his legs. Tried to be soothing.

“Who’s good little boy are you?” Joe’s voice hissed into his ear. “Who do you belong to?”

Carl opened his eyes. His wet lips quivered as he blearily stared up at the roof of the tent, bangs stuck to his lashes, Joe’s hand pressing against his forehead. His breath came in intermittent labored gasps when Joe’s heavy thighs began to pump against him, driving that splintering ache in a steady rhythm as his insides languidly adjusted.

And slowly, the pain dulled. And with each thrust, he began to feel that trembling, exhilarating, revolting warmth.

Carl stopped moving. His fingers splayed defeatedly on the floor, rather than clawing at it. There was no other sound, no other motion in the tent that wasn’t their weighted breaths or the collision of flesh, and somewhere beneath it all were the muffled cries of pain and pleasure knotted in Carl’s arched throat.

He focused on the vacuous void inside of his head where his parents’ reassuring voices used to be. Pushed them down when they tried to emerge.

“I’m yours.”

He didn’t deserve to hear them.

 

* * *

 

Hours of relative silence had passed before Carl dared to move.

He vacantly watched his fingers slip against the floor until his arm was extended. He felt the flexibility of the fabric, carefully bunched it into his loose fist, then paused to stare at the whites of his knuckles against the nylon, searching for a change in Joe’s breathing. An unexpected twitch in the muscle of his chest. An upset in the pattern of his snores, puffing into the hairs at the nape of Carl’s neck.

Nothing.

Joe had drifted to sleep not long after climbing off him. He’d had one last sip of a bitter-smelling liquid sitting at the bottom of a mason jar before abandoning it and roughly dragging Carl down to the floor with him. There was no attempt to resume their usual routine. No attempt to fix his clothes. To push him to the other side of the tent. To threaten him to stay where he was.

No attempt to re-bind him.

The carelessness was unsettling. Carl had spent the better part of the night tensely lying still with Joe clutching him like a safety blanket, not knowing what to do. Then Joe began to relinquish his hold. Then the embers snapping off the charred wood outside became muffled, and the other voices went quiet. And then a troubling calm settled inside of him, and without even realizing it, his body, acting of its own accord, had begun the agonizingly slow process of trying to slip out of Joe’s arms.

Carl used his grip on the tent floor to pull himself, centimeter by centimeter, out from the curve of Joe’s chest. He felt the limp forearm dangling over his shoulder gradually slide back until its fingers were just grazing the skin above his collar, and he stopped. There was a slight grunt behind him. A minute change in a breathing pattern that Carl picked up on immediately. He waited several more minutes before risking another inch outward.

Eventually, he drifted far enough for the fingers on him to fall away, and he had enough room to gingerly push his palms into the floor, wincing all the while at every little sound—creek in the nylon, crack of his wrists, hitch in his breathing—as he climbed onto his knees, and glanced back.

Joe was still peacefully asleep. The plump and sagging skin of his naked body was covered in a sheen of perspiration, curled into the empty space where Carl had been held.

It turned his stomach.

Carl dropped his head. He shakily tried to pull his drooping jeans back up over his hips and secure his belt, his knuckles grazing the fluids crusted over on his abdomen, the stains on the hem of his shirt. Tears began to slip down the bridge of his nose as his fingertips moved to his button. When he accidentally touched the denim over his groin, he felt a painful wrench in his gut, and paused as a choking sensation slid up his throat. His hands trembled.

_"Who do you belong to?"_

Carl sat with his eyes closed in the darkness, lips pulled back in a silent grimace, cold fingers wavering over his waistband. He struggled to stay calm, despite a desperate urge to completely crumble under the weight of the anger and confusion that was pushing him back toward the floor, where the familiarity of getting lost in his own hysterics would welcome him.

He could do that, and think about how everyone seemed aware of this secret about the world but him.

He could think about how he was stupid, and ignorant, and lonely in all of it, and beyond vague playground murmurs, he had no frame of reference for the things that were happening or why, and no one to explain it to him.

He could think about how the word _sex_ had floated in the back of his mind every minute of every day since that first night at the bungalow.

He could think about the pain and phantom sensations that manifested indefinitely, and that he never really felt like Joe wasn’t on top of him.

He could think about what he himself had just done, what he allowed to happen, the sounds that came out of his mouth.

He could think about all of this, and he could cry, and wake Joe with the sounds he was making, and he could get beat, re-bound, and left to lie in his blood again, and because it was easier, a part of him _wanted_ to. He might have, if it wasn’t for the vividly detailed, unsettling memory of the little walker lying face-down in the creek with a bayonet wound in its skull.

What was happening couldn’t last.

He knew this.

And despite the myriad of emotions storming inside of him, he also knew that he’d made his decision the moment he realized that Joe had passed out without restraining him. It was a sign. The part of him that wanted to stay on the floor would scream and shriek, _don’t this. He will kill you_ , and it would persistently remind him of death, of non-existence, of the blue void of his father’s eyes, of how if he just _tried_ , he could get used to this, it didn’t _always_ have to _hurt_ , and it would claw at him when he finally gave one last look back at Joe’s sleeping fleshy body.

_“It’s time to go. You know you can’t stay here.”_

But it wouldn’t stop him when he numbly crawled over to the tent flap, and began to pull the zipper.

 

* * *

 

The strangers protected the encampment with a perimeter of barbed wire. No one had stayed up to keep watch.

They slept in close quarters, some with sleeping bags or mats, others burrowed against tree trunks with their limbs tangled in roots.

Hunched on all fours with his palms tense in the dirt, Carl trained his eyes on the amorphous shapes of their bodies in the darkness. He was still, frozen in place outside the opening of the tent, his heart savagely pounding in his chest and cold sweat dripping from his temples. His shoulders had begun to shake. His legs were weak. But he stayed focused, assessing each near formless mass just barely illuminated by the moonlight through the trees, and he listened.

He heard occasional, small shuffles against the soft fabrics of sleeping bags. Snores. A toad or two tucked somewhere in the woods. He heard the sound of the creek in the distance, and the brush of a light breeze on the pine trees. And… something else.

But there were no voices. No other movements. No heads snapping up to see him slowly, very, very slowly, lift himself upward. No one to watch him take careful steps backwards on the pads of his feet, struggling to keep his boots from scuffing into the dry dirt as his gaze remained firmly planted on the center of the clearing, and the sleeping bodies. He kept his breathing low and steady. Fought to keep his legs anchored when they began to lose feeling. Still, no one noticed him.

He loosely touched the air behind his back, and felt for the prick of the barbed wire border. When he found it, he was careful to duck into it without shifting his eyes, or without having to turn around.

But Carl had only taken a few short steps behind the perimeter before his legs suddenly stopped working.

He frowned. His fingers, trickling with blood from the wire, slowly reached up, and combed through his stringy hair.

He’d forgotten his hat.

Carl’s mouth went dry. A cold quiver slowly crawled up through his insides. His eyes uneasily scanned the glade, hand frozen and dripping blood into his scalp, feeling his will fracture. The cowardly voice in his mind fixated on that hat. Its significance. The memories it arose. The comfort it brought him. The voice screamed erratically for him to _go back_ , to get his _father’s_ hat, and if he decided to stay, that would be okay, too. That maybe Joe wouldn’t hit him too hard if he came back, wouldn’t kill him, maybe he would even reward Carl for being good and not running away when he could have.

It held his legs in place as it reminded him that he couldn’t be alone out there, anyway, and that the incident at the creek proved it.

Carl paused.

The creek.

The little walker.

Both hands drifted to his head. His breath became trapped in his chest.

His vacant gaze fell to his feet, and he had just begun to feel his gut curl when his increasingly erratic thoughts suddenly came a full stop.

That voice went silent.

His eyes narrowed at the ground. One of his boots took a small, careful step back, trailing something beneath the sole. A thin scrap of old leather. Dirty. The color egg yolk. When he glanced around his feet, he found more scraps of this leather. Against the rough bark of a tree behind him, he saw torn fabric, what looked jam sticking to it, pattered in the dirt, a gruesome smell accompanying all of it.

He heard that sound again. That “something else.”

_“I told ya Joe, they’re gettin’ closer.”_

His heartbeat suddenly felt too loud. He took another step back. Looked up.

And froze.

He stopped breathing. His vision began to dim.

Billy was standing on the other side of the perimeter, staring at him, with his rifle loosely hooked into the crook of his arm. His eyes were wide beneath the brim of his cap. His eyebrows became furrowed when the shock slipped from his face, and Carl, like an animal facing the lights of an oncoming truck, couldn’t move. He stared _into_ Billy, _through_ him, suddenly imagining the faces of the other strangers at his back. His entire body flooded with adrenaline.

Billy parted his lips. Mouthed the words, _don’t do this_ , and slowly shook his head at him.

But all of it felt very, very far away.

And Carl stopped hearing the frightened voice. He stopped thinking about the warning signs beneath his boots. His ears began to ring, his eyesight tunneled, and the image of Billy silently pleading with him slipped into the darkness.

Carl took one step back.

Another.

And before Billy could reach over the wire and stop him, he turned,

and ran.


	6. ouroboros (pt. 2)

* * *

  

**_ouroboros (pt. 2)_ **

* * *

  
  
  
He ran.

And he ran.

And he ran.

The uneven, root-knotted earth pounded beneath his boots. Tree branches snapped against his skin. Sweat pooled into a ring around his collar, his lungs felt like they were on fire, and his injured knees were buckling every time his heels thrust into the ground.

But still, he ran.

Carl blindly tore through the dark thicket, deafened by his heartbeat, dumb with panic and adrenaline. His stumbling feet led him in all directions but the right one, his hands needlessly slipped over the coarse bodies of trees in some vague effort to steady himself, and he was barreling, senselessly, off the safety of the trail, and into a tight clump of trees that stretched miles deep and grew blacker by the inch.

A voice was in the back of his mind, telling him that he was being careless. His blood-and-sweat-slickened palms were leaving imprints on the branches that curved into the path he was creating with his erratic movements. His boots were crunching too loudly on the dry leaves and needles. He wasn’t smelling the rot filtering in from the depth of the woods, wasn’t seeing the dried husks of skin sticking to his heels, wasn’t hearing that _something else_ emanating like white noise behind the blood rushing in his ears, and he wasn’t looking back.

There was no instinct that wasn’t _keep running_.

So, detrimentally, he ignored the voice. And he ran.

Carl was nearly a mile into the cramped expanse when that vacuous, paralyzing rush began to fade. He felt a sharp pinch in his muscles.

His rapidly pumping arms slid to his sides when he tried to ease his body into a jog, but first fell instead into a breathless, heaving saunter, then barely a walk. His damp feet were slipping around the inside of his shoes when he finally staggered to a complete stop.

And then, abruptly, Carl’s vision went sideward, and he hit the ground.

 

* * *

  
  
  
_“Are you afraid of dying?”_

_Daryl peered over at him through a curl in his bangs, grimly inquisitive and aware that it was a question Carl hadn’t meant to ask._

_“That somethin’ you think about?”_

_Carl shrugged. “Sometimes. Yeah.”_

_“You shouldn’t.”_

_Carl began fidgeting with a piece of mite-eaten wood in his lap. A mason jar of nails, a hammer, and a pile of roughly-made grave crosses fanned across the floor in front of him. One was incomplete. The name on it didn’t read well, and the silence ran thick when Carl caught Daryl looking at it._

_It was no secret that Carl had been spending too much time in that room, but it only seemed to become apparent in that moment._

_“This about your mom?” Daryl asked carefully. “Or that Jewish kid?”_

_Carl averted his eyes to the shakily written name on the plank at his hip. “No. I mean, I dunno. Maybe.” He shifted. Pretended to be interested in his hands. “And Carol said Patrick was a ‘practicing Atheist.’”_

_Daryl’s shadow crossed the floor in front of him, slow and uncertain. Carl could feel his eyes on the wood scrap he was pinching between his fingers to hide the tremble in them._

_They seemed to have both forgotten why Daryl had come down there in the first place. His crossbow was in hand, purple walker blood still sticking to a few bolts clutched in the other, and his clothes were dirty from what Carl assumed was another run with Michonne. Something was sticking out of his pocket._

_“Y’know, that’s not really somethin’ you should be worryin’ ‘bout, Carl... It don’t lead to any good,” Daryl mumbled, loosely motioning with the bloodied bolts. “Why don’t you put this crap away and go outside? The dead ain’t goin’ nowhere and we still got a few hours before sundown. And your sister is probably—”_

_“Hershel says the dead go back to God.”_

_Daryl paused. When Carl looked up at him, his expression was unreadable._

_“You believe that?” he asked quietly._

_“No. I think we’re alone.”_

_Carl watched Daryl’s eyes begin to scan the gray concrete walls, visibly uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation. Whatever reason he had traveled all that way to the back of the prison, where Carl had stashed himself after the incident with Patrick and the others, it wasn’t for this._

_“So… what do you think happens, then?” Daryl questioned after a pause._

_“I dunno. Nothing, I guess,” Carl near-whispered, pulling a bent nail from the jar. “Patrick used to say that he thought it was like going to sleep and never waking up. But I think it’s more like… you just disappear. And all that’s left is what people remember about you. Until they forget. Or die, too. Then it’s like you were never here. You’re just… gone.”_

_Daryl was quiet. When Carl gathered the courage to pull his gaze from the floor, he found him pensive and frowning._

_“When I was a kid…” Carl watched him, slowly and thoughtfully, begin. “Merle and I used to skip school a lot to go screw around in the woods, or get lit by the lake. I walked away not really havin’ learned anything. Like, not a damn thing. Except this.” Daryl paused, and pulled something from his pocket. He held it out to Carl. “Some nerd in dockers tried to tell me that the Greeks used to think that time was a circle. They used pictures of snakes eating their own tails to show that the past looks it like disappears, but really, it just goes somewhere else. And in order for the snake, or time, to keep growin’, it has to keep eating its tail, and cycling through the past.”_

_Carl took the object from Daryl’s hand. It was a hoop, probably part of someone’s necklace, spotted with dried blood. He rolled it around in his fingers for a moment, contemplating Daryl’s words before petulantly murmuring, “I don’t care. I don’t wanna be cycled through. I don’t want anyone else to die.”_

_“You’re missin’ the point,” Daryl persisted. “It’s not just time. People do this, too. In order for them to grow, they’ve gotta cycle through their pasts, their memories, what makes them who they think they are. They can keep those things, think about them, let them be voices that tell them the way, but they can’t coexist with them and still expect to grow and survive.”_

_Carl had begun to anxiously grind his teeth the more Daryl spoke. He was glowering at the blood-stained hoop when Daryl suddenly reached out and patted him lightly on the head._

_“Nothin’ is gonna happen to you, Carl,” he said gently. “You’re strong, and a survivor, like your dad. This entire prison and everyone in it would have to go down before we let anythin’ get you, and even, they’d have to get by your old man. So, don’t think about this crap anymore. Just get your skinny ass outside and play like a normal kid.”_

_Daryl abruptly left him with his thoughts, and the sullied necklace piece white-knuckle gripped in one hand._

 

* * *

  
  
  
There was no telling how long he’d lied there. He barely remembered falling down.

His body felt heavy. Sweat was in his eyes. Every rise and drop of his chest felt monumental, and his was mouth agape, heaving the humid night air in bottomless gulps that never seemed to reach his lungs.

The space he’d dropped into was confining and vaguely claustrophobic. It was deceptively quiet, and still, and there was no shouting. No gunshots. No bodies lumbering through the trees. Just a tight circle of pines and birches, towering over him, staring down, creating a net overhead and blocking the sky.

Carl’s gaze dragged along the branches. His hands, weighted and unresponsive, strained to wipe the perspiration from his eyes, and he struggled to lift his head to squint down the path. There was nothing. Nothing to see but darkness. Nothing to hear but a silence that didn’t sit well with him.

No, not silence.

Something was there. That _something else_ , that was only somewhat discernible from the sound of his own breathing.

He tried to cover his mouth, searching through the lightless spaces between the trees, the electric thrum of his adrenaline returning as he mulled the possibility that the strangers had taken another route. Maybe he was mistaken. Maybe this wasn’t the same sound as the one at the camp. Maybe this was them, and they were coming. They’d been scavenging there for roughly a week, and they would know the forest better than he did.

He couldn’t stay there.

Carl shakily pushed himself up from the ground. His hands, trembling with a renewed energy, brushed dirt and pine needles from his jeans. One reached around him to pluck what he thought was a dry leaf sticking to the back of his neck as his thoughts continued to spin, and his eyes searched the blackness.

He had to force himself further in.

He took a tight and sloping path. He thought he could see moonlight ahead, just within a small clearing that was barely larger than the one he’d fallen into, but there weren’t any visible trails, any exits out of the knobby trees and roots that connected and enclosed around him. It was a strange dichotomy of entrapment and safety. And the deeper he burrowed himself, the more uneasy he became, as that sound, that very particular sound, that he could have mistaken for a breeze if he wasn’t sure he couldn’t feel it on his skin, was becoming louder.

Carl headed for the clearing, carefully stepping around mysteries in the dirt, gently touching the bodies of trees to help guide himself, when a stream of moonlight jutting through an opening above happened to slide over one of his reaching hands.

He stopped. Rolled it over, so it was palm-up.

Something sticky was on it. Dark red, maybe maroon. He didn’t have to smell it to know what it was.

_The leaf._

Carl’s slowly reached around himself. He found more leaves sticking to his back.

_Not leaves._

He tried to brush them off. Some were sticking to his clothes. One became trapped in the inlets in his fingers, and when he pulled them back, he saw that yolk-yellow leather, paper-thin, smelling like decay, fixed to his hand.

_Not leather._

Carl gasped and snapped his wrist out, trying to shake it away, face scrunched in revulsion. He thought he was going to vomit. The odor was awful. And it was everywhere. Sticking to his clothes. His skin. He frantically tried to wipe it from the back of his shirt just to have it glue itself to his fingers and get caught beneath his nails. His eyes dropped to ground, where there were more scraps sticking to his boots.

His heart lodged itself in his throat. He suddenly felt lightheaded, breathless, and was fighting another onslaught of stupefying panic.

_The meat would attract more rotters._

Walkers. Walkers were near.

_“I told ya Joe, they’re gettin’ closer.”_

Carl withheld his breath, and struggled to stay calm as he held his dirty hands out and away from him. He tried to coerce himself toward the clearing, where he was convinced he’d feel safer. He all but forgot about Joe and the others, fixating instead on the blurred memories of being dragged into the woods that first day, of the walker signs, of seeing those same signs minutes ago right outside the wire barrier.

The walkers had _always_ been near. But to Carl’s knowledge, they’d never entered the camp. Never gotten close to it while they were there. Why?

Carl was grappling with this when he heard a sound that caused him to go still.

He was several feet short of the clearing, but he could see a twisting birch tree inside of it, a pile of roots snaking crudely up through the dirt, and something hunched down. It was black even in the moonlight. Carl thought he could see the knobs of a bony spine, the curve of a skull, but there was something else supernaturally wrong with what he was looking at.

It occurred to him that he should run. But he couldn’t move.

He was transfixed, icy sweat gathering along his flushed forehead, legs like lead. The thing was squatting over something tucked behind the tree roots, and there was a mass sticking straight through its stomach. Even from where he stood, Carl could hear the snap of its teeth against something soft and wet, and the sounds were enough to make him blanche.

 _Run_.

Carl took a step to the side. Then another step. His hands reached blindly for the nearest tree trunk to balance himself, vision fixed on the grotesque image in the clearing, not thinking. He watched the creature, listened to the squishing sounds as it chewed on something he couldn’t see, and failed to catch the lump in the dirt that caught his foot.

He inhaled. Wildly threw his hands out to catch his balance against a pine, and caught himself before he tripped.

The poor light didn’t fully illuminate the pale pink heap, but Carl immediately saw enough. _Smelled_ enough.

Without thinking, he released a horrified cry, and went stumbling back.

It was a pig. Massive and decaying. Entire chunks of its face were missing, the bones of its ribs were jutting through a hole in its belly, and something had taken its eyes.

He tried to step back. Stumbled again.

Carl remembered what Harley had said about seeing pigs. He remembered the farmlands, the talk of the missing chickens (the coops had been empty, hadn’t they?), the walkers never having bothered them up to that point. They’d been drawn to the escaped livestock. Feeding on them. Circling the forest without ever needing to get close.

He heard a sound. Something _plopped_ soggily onto the ground.

His eyes drew back to the creature.

It was staring at him. Near-black with decay. Bony and tall. Blood and organs dripping from its jaw. The mass that had pierced its stomach was the head of a bull. It’d gored the walker clean through, before something else chewed off its neck and severed it from the rest of its body.

Then, there was that sound.

Not the wind. Not any more than the walker skin had been leather or leaves. Not anymore than the coagulated blood had been jelly. No, it was a low, condensed roar of groans and growls, of shuffling through the brush, against tree bark, of movement, of something _huge_ , and that realization only further solidified itself as Carl remembered that voice that had been warning him so loudly when he ran off the main trail.

He’d thrown himself right into them.

All of them.

Carl began to back up. The creature watched him, head cocking, bits of its skin hanging from the bones of its face. If it saw him, if it saw _anything_ , it didn’t make a move until Carl suddenly reached down and stole a fist-sized rock from the ground.

Then it _shrieked_ —a raspy, high-pitched sound, pulpy with blood and pig tissue, and it lunged.

Carl immediately swore and beelined to his right, missing its claws by inches, tearing away from the clearing and hurtling back into the darkness.

He didn’t know where he was going. Running back the way he came wasn’t an option. Staying still wasn’t option. That fear that made him daft and reactive returned, and he could have been right back where he started, bolting from Billy’s outstretched hand, cold terror simultaneously gripping him and shoving him forward as shapes and shadows in the dark blurred past the outskirts of his vision.

Carl only made it twenty or thirty feet before he was forced to stop, his knees jerking to a halt, hobbling, threatening to drop him.

His mouth fell and breathed out a low, chest-deep sound that could have been a cry, a groan, a sob, as shapes in the black before him began to manifest through the trees, dragging that _something else_ with it. He helplessly gripped the rock still in hand, and watched as dozens—no, more than that, he could _hear_ them, _hundreds_ —of walkers poured through the woods, drawn to his blood, which was still warm and dribbling from the barbed wire, slipping down the curves of his palms.

They were dragging their bodies from his left. To his right. Dressed in farmwear, nightgowns, some in suits and ties, barely held together after years of wear. They were from nowhere and everywhere, drawn in by the livestock, and the living seeking refuge in the safety of the woods.

Carl sunk back. He tried to listen for any shuffling behind him, but their sounds were thick and omnipresent, encasing him, pushing him back until he had no choice but to risk it. His head snapped around just long enough to ensure nothing was at his back, and then he turned tail, and fled.

And they followed. Swaying and hobbling. Snarling after him.

 

* * *

  
  
  
Carl’s injured knees were screaming by the time he reached the small clearing.

He was forced to stop again, lurched over himself, heaving for air and fighting to stay on his feet despite the threat behind him.

The sounds they were making only seemed to be getting more prolific. It was coming from all sides now—north, south, east, west, the sky, the dirt, the inside of his own head—and he didn’t know which direction to take. Everything around him felt black and infinite. He couldn’t remember how he got there and couldn’t go back. But the walkers were drawing closer, hissing and clawing their way through the forest, nearly visible just beyond the skirt of the moonlight, and he didn’t _know_ what to _do_.

Then, something cold and dry brushed the skin on the back of his neck, and caught his collar.

Carl didn’t even have time to cry out before it yanked back, and his arms flew behind him to instinctively push it away.

Chomping teeth missed his ear by inches. A bony forearm tried to reach around him and pin his body back against its chest. Carl felt something sharp jab into his spine, and heard a squishing sound as a jaw tried to bite at his face.

There was a rancid stench of death and hot blood pouring from the mouth, wet and rich, curdling Carl’s stomach. It was disorienting. Dizzying. He had to close his eyes to keep his balance, to keep his hands clawing back at the thin body trying to yank him toward it.

Without thinking, Carl’s elbow suddenly jerked back, and crashed into the creature’s side. It was enough to send it stumbling, its claws pulled from the bunching fabric of his shirt, and Carl spun around, and backed away.

He was face-to-face with the black walker with the bull head in its fatless gut.

It was worse up close. The creature was jagged and almost sleek in the darkness, unable to stand upright, threaded bits of organs still dangling from its mouth. Its face was a skull only patched with whatever had been left its skin. And although there were no actual eyes, just thin blobs of decaying, silky white tissue sitting in its sockets, Carl felt like it was watching him as he stood there, poised with the rock still clutched in a bloody hand.

A conviction stole over him that he not only was going to have to kill this thing, but that he wanted to.

The walker dove for him, screeching, thin arms snapping upward.

Carl ducked just as its nails skimmed the tip of his bangs and he slammed the rock into the nearest brittle knee. It tottered when the bone broke but didn’t fall until Carl hit the ground, used both hands to grab its legs, and wrenched back as hard as he could.

He didn’t even wait for the impact before he was recklessly climbing up onto the rotting body and pinning its elbows into the ground with his knees.

And then he lifted the rock above his head, and brought it down.

Again.

And again.

And again.

The creature’s skull smashed inward and collapsed. What remained of its brain matter sprinkled the dirt in a halo around its head. Its thick blood spattered the skin up to Carl’s elbows, touched his face, caught in his hair, and the bull in its stomach jammed its horns painfully into the backs of his legs.

But he didn’t care.

He had completely lost control.

He lost the rock inside the walker’s head, but his fists took over, shattering every flimsy bone in its face. It didn’t need one. The visage was already there in Carl’s mind, wearing an eyepatch, waiting outside the prison gates with Hershel on his knees. Or it was standing over his father with a bowie knife in a creaking bungalow. Or it was white-haired and naked and touching him between his legs. It was _there_ , Carl could _see_ it, and he was standing behind the collapsing prison walls, his little sister’s carrier bloody and empty, and he was holding a rifle, and he was wild, and his father was throwing his arms around his shoulders and tearing him away.

Something _was_ tearing him away.

Only this time, it wasn’t his father.

Carl howled, sobbing when he was pulled off the walker’s body by a pair of hands suddenly hooking his waist.

He screamed. Thrashed. Tried to bring his elbows back, kick his heels, found that he was being lifted entirely off the ground and all he could do was flail. Warm fingertips dug into his forearms and pressed him tightly against their body until Carl began to expend himself. They stayed that way until he finally slowed, fell limp, and began crying quietly as he bent over the curve of their elbows, exhausted. Defeated.

“We gotta go,” they said, his father’s exact words, before they dragged him away from the gory mess beneath him, and from the horde of the dead trekking just feet from where they stood.

 

* * *

  
  
  
They were close to the creek, a mile or so up from where Carl had nearly drowned the day before. He was numbly allowing himself to be led into it, a fingerless-gloved hand gripping his arm and pulling him into the cool knee-deep water, no explanation being offered, when his burning eyes finally lifted to the tired and gloomy look on Billy’s face.

They hadn’t spoken a word.

Billy had been firm but gentle when he guided Carl out of the woods. He’d followed a series of markers that he’d staked into trees and wrapped with reflective blue electrical tape, leading them out of the darkness and onto the rocky banks flanking the creek.

Several feet down the shore were more strips of tape left on boulders and hanging branches. Several feet from there, opposite of them, was a scar in the bank.

They didn’t discuss the scar, or how Billy had known about it, or whether it’d be enough to protect them from the mass trudging through the fringes of the forest behind them. They didn’t debate attempting to run instead, neither prepared, both limping and drained. And there was no hostility when Carl hesitated at first to crawl into it. Just a weary silence, and a sigh, followed by Billy lowering himself into the watery cavity, and then motioning for Carl to do the same.

And he did. Crestfallen and subdued, he did.

 

* * *

  
  
  
Hours later, Carl was woken by a hand over his mouth.

He’d been dreaming about being eaten alive by a bull without eyes. It’d found him stashed in the tiny alcove with its hot wet snout dipped under the overhang, and it had slowly and deliberately drawn its muzzle up along the insides of his thighs and stomach until it found a soft spot to bite down on. Carl had been watching his blood slip into the water around his waist, knowing that he was dying, when it’d begun to snow.

Maybe he’d imagined a cowboy in the distance. Or maybe that was just his attempt to insert something meaningful where there was nothing.

Whatever the case, he still felt a sadness welling up in him when his eyes snapped open and he found himself staring emptily out over the surface of the creek, Billy’s hand retreating from his jaw, the tension from the chest pressed tight against his back beginning to evaporate as the dwindling walkers failed to act on whatever noises Carl had been making in his sleep.

Not that there were many left. A majority of the horde had lost interest before the sun had risen and moved back into the trees. Those that remained were still meandering just beyond the mouth of the scar, where Carl was being clutched uncomfortably tight into the crescent-shaped dip between Billy’s chest and knees, their limbs tangled, an arm propped under his head to keep it from slipping beneath the water’s surface.

They still hadn’t spoken. Anything worth saying felt futile and pathetic, and Carl couldn’t muster the hope or the energy to force it on Billy. He was bitter. And tired. And resigned to whatever was to come.

Billy had other plans. Carl sensed that he’d been on the verge of an I-told-you-so, his stomach tightening against Carl’s spine every once in a while as he wrestled with the urge to speak. He’d been unsuccessful only up to the point in which he was not.

Then when Billy suddenly cleared his throat, and anger settled in Carl’s belly, unbidden, at the intrusiveness of it, Carl realized the words were finally coming. He frowned and stared at the water.

“I tried to tell you.”

Carl closed his eyes. There it was.

“I don’t blame you for doing it, but I tried to tell you.” Billy’s chin adjusted against the back of his head as he spoke. His voice was calm, and quiet, starting out slow. “This place has been overrun with rotters for at least as long as the world’s been under. And… even if you’d made it to sunup, half our guys have been tracking their entire lives. You would’ve been picked back up in less than a day.”

This news should have been devastating. And in a dulled and muted way, it was, Carl’s own compelling naivety still managing to offset him. But more than anything, he was just tired of it. All of it.

“Stop talking,” Carl whispered. “Please. Just don’t talk anymore.”

Billy shrugged, nonchalant as ever. “Sorry.”

 

* * *

  
  
  
_“Sorry.”_

Carl thought about that word a lot on the way back.

‘Sorry’ meant nothing to him in the grand scheme of things. It wasn’t going to pull him from his death march to the encampment or protect him from being held accountable for every broken promise he’d made to obey, to be good, to not try to run. It didn’t soothe the cold, fluttery ache in his stomach when he tried to process that he might be killed for it.

It meant absolutely nothing.

But it was almost accidental the way it caused Carl to think about that night on the floor, a dried puddle of blood on one side and a poisoned hard candy on the other, and being told “sorry” like it was an afterthought. He hadn’t quite realized it then but Carl knew now that he’d wanted to hear it. He’d wanted to be treated with some vague sort of gentleness that, in any other situation, would’ve seemed unsettlingly cruel. He’d wanted to be lied to.

He had been. Without any real obligation, Billy had done that for him, and was still doing that for him. Still murmuring empty apologies. Still avoiding the worst aspects of what was happening. Still protecting him in a way that didn’t feel like he was protecting him at all.

And he was still lying to him.

“You’re full of shit.”

The squishing sounds of wet boots in front of him faltered. Carl didn’t look up, focusing instead on the beads of water sliding off his clothes into the dirt as he trudged behind, soaking wet, shivering despite the heat.

“Yeah, you mentioned that,” Billy mumbled passively.

Carl ignored him. “You could’ve left me with those things last night, you know. I wouldn’t have made to sunup. You said it yourself.”

“So?”

“So, I think you’re full of shit. I think you’ve been lying to me.” Carl stopped walking, and watched Billy do the same. “You said the only reason I’m alive is because I didn’t take the candy from you. That’s bullshit.”

Billy looked back, an eyebrow slightly raised, considering him with an air of surprise. Carl frowned back at him, aware of how petulant he looked. He was frustrated by Billy’s calm and indifference and he couldn’t even piece together why. Billy was not obligated to be nice to him. He wasn’t even obligated to listen to him now, but the threat of being dismissed by him put a dent in Carl’s composure.

When Billy failed to respond, Carl looked him in the eye, and steeled himself for what he was about to say.

“I’m not alive right now because I didn’t take the candy,” he asserted carefully. “I’m alive because you changed your mind.”

Billy stared at him, lips a grim line in his thin face. Carl tried to read him, the hands he’d curled into defiant fists at his sides beginning to slack as a sense of uncertainly settled between them. He’d been sure that this was the truth. A lot from that night had fogged over, but not the intense look on Billy’s face nor the grip on his wrists immediately following the _tap_ of the candy hitting the wood floors. It wasn’t something he’d allowed himself to consider before but now he couldn’t avoid it.

“I remember,” Carl murmured, searching Billy answers. “I remember, you dropped it.”

“Because you were losing it, little man. You were about to get my ass beat.”

“No, that’s not why,” Carl pushed, treading as carefully as he could manage with the anger that was welling up inside of him. “I remember. I remember that barely even tried to hand it off to me. You asked me once, and you didn’t try again after that. You could’ve forced it down my throat or left but you stayed and talked to me instead. And then you _dropped_ it. And then you told me about your mom.”

Billy regarded him for a moment, weary and increasingly tense. “I’m gonna need you to drop _this_. If the sun’s got anything to say about it, we’re already late getting back, and Joe’s waiting.”

A chill slid up Carl’s spine at the mention of Joe. He knew he had to act fast. “You can change your mind now, you know.”

“Little man—“

“You can,” Carl blurted, that cold ache growing, fracturing his self-control. “You don’t have to bring me back. You can just tell them you couldn’t find me. Or you can tell them I was eaten. Joe would never even know the difference. You don’t _have_ to do this!”

Carl apprehensively watched for a reaction, hands shaking at his sides in the loaded silence that followed. He’d expected a blunt reassurance or another shrug, Billy’s idiosyncrasies feeling slightly familiar to him now—the _sorry_ s, the _I can’t help you_ s, the _keep your head up_ s, but he just stood there, staring at him, offering that bare minimum of sympathy that made Carl feel hopeless.

“Billy,” Carl tried, posture going slack as his throat tightened, and his eyesight blurred. “He’s gonna hurt me. And then he’s gonna kill me.”

He let the words settle until he reluctantly lowered his gaze, trying to hide the tears threatening to spill down his face. Saying it made it that much more real. He’d been evading the more graphic details of Joe’s threats up to that point, but now they there planted at the forefront of his thoughts, right where Joe wanted them.

_“I’ll take you down into the dirt and crush your throat like a baby bird.”_

Billy suddenly cleared his throat, jolting Carl from his increasingly dark thoughts. When he looked up, he found Billy shifting on his bad ankle, eyes averted, clearly contemplating something. His brows were furrowed under the brim of his hat.

“You’re inconvenient,” he said after a moment.

Carl frowned. “I’m what?”

“You’re inconvenient,” Billy repeated pointedly. “This whole thing,” he motioned to Carl, the woods. “is inconvenient. It’s not how things work. We claim our time with bed warmers. We don’t claim them for ourselves, and we definitely don’t drag them around for this long. It’s why everyone’s so on edge. And why Len is basically begging to cut your throat every five minutes. No one knows what to do with you.”

Carl felt like recoiling at Billy’s words, his eyes red-rimmed and narrowed in disgust. “That’s not my fault.”

“No, it’s not,” Billy agreed. “But it’s not really ours either. We’ve had rules for this sort of thing for a long time now, and by claiming you for himself, Joe made a pretty monumental decision that’s fucking with how things work. But I don’t think he would’ve done that if he didn’t have a reason.”

Carl looked down at his feet. He began to fidget with the frayed ends of his shirt—the one Joe had given him to replace the one his father had—trying to work out whether or not these words should mean anything to him, or if they were just leading to same inescapable conclusion. Billy wasn’t making that very clear.

“Here’s the deal little man,” Billy began, studying him. “We’re going back. I don’t want to have to tie you up and drag you, but I will, if I have to. There’s no getting around that. But.” Billy paused, holding up a hand before Carl could protest. “ _But_ , on the way there, I want you to do yourself a favor and think about the things Joe says to you when you’re alone. Stuff he likes to hear. What he likes to talk about. Don’t shy away from the worst of it. It might be useful.”

Carl sensed the blood draining from his face as he stood with his shirt anxiously twisting in his fists, feeling dizzy with apprehension. “Why?”

“Because you’re inconvenient,” he repeated, vaguely, with another shrug. “And because I think it might buy you more time.”

 

* * *

  
  
  
Their entire trek back, Carl was struggling to contain himself. He didn’t want this. Even if he could somehow keep Joe from following through with his threats, he was still going right back to where he’d been, naked and being crushed under Joe’s body, being touched, laughed at, having things put _inside_ of him. His skin prickled, and he tried to focus on his wet boots as he crossed his arms over himself.

He told Billy he didn’t want to go.

Billy told him to make an effort.

To make things easier on himself.

To adapt.

To not go gentle.

Carl knew it was meant to be helpful advice, but it only upset him. He had to stop to collect himself when he broke down, and when his body tried to heave food that wasn’t there. Billy was patient and stood at a distance. Carl could see the pity on his face when he got up, but they didn’t talk about it.

Right as they were approaching the familiar skirt of trees around the encampment, Carl paused, taking in the half-circle of broken down wire, the collapsed tent, the firepit surrounded by glass jars. Joe was standing at a safe distance with a cigarette pinched between his fingers, mulling about with the others. They hadn’t been touched by the horde.

“Are you afraid of dying?”

Carl caught Billy’s eye as his head snapped back at him, eyebrows raised.

He didn’t expect a response, and didn’t press the issue when Billy simply shrugged and turned back around. It was no more an answer than the one he’d gotten on the floor of the prison with his jar of rusted nails and grave crosses, no less comforting, and it still left Carl feeling empty.

He stared at the ground, and half-heartedly drew a circle in the dirt with his boot.

“When you’re alone with him, get down on your knees,” Billy told him. “Let him talk. Listen to him. And remember what I told you.” He glanced back again, giving it a moment to sink in, and Carl tried to appear brave as he met his gaze. “Do what you have to do.”

 

* * *

  
  
  
The others kept their distance when he and Billy approached. Joe met them halfway.

He was led, wordlessly, away from the clearing, and down the familiar path that led them back to the place where Carl had almost drowned. The body of the little walker was still there.

They stopped just short of the bank. Carl abruptly did as Billy had told him, and slid to his knees when he was left standing near the rocks. He listened to Joe’s boots pausing in the dirt. Smelled the smoke from his cigarette drift in his direction. His eyes drifted listlessly along the ground and at the trembling hands folded in his lap, where there was an icy numbness in the fingers that were pressing into the dried cuts in his palms, and he waited.

_“Do what you have to do.”_

“I thought you and I had an understanding.”

Carl tensed.

“I thought we had this whole thing down pat, you and I.” Joe took a slow and deliberate drag from his cigarette. Carl pressed his knees tighter together, and exhaled a shuddering breath when he saw the gray smoke waft into his line of vision. His arm tingled. “I thought I made myself very clear when I told you ‘bout how things work around here. What happens when you break the rules. And I thought you got it.”

Carl tried not to focus on the words, the deafening calm in Joe’s voice. He couldn’t crumble.

“Now, you’re not the brightest bulb in the bunch, but you do know better. I know you do, ‘cause I haven’t had to have this conversation with you yet. Not really.” Joe paused, tapping ash into the dirt, considering him for a moment. Carl sensed the cock of his head when he heard him ask, “I never told you what happened to our last bitch, did I?”

He didn’t answer. It wasn’t really a question.

“Well, shit,” Joe murmured, a snicker in his voice. “I thought someone would’a told you by now. Maybe Billy, with how much you two love to gossip.”

Carl’s eyes snapped up. He felt the blood rush from his face, the tension in the air becoming all-consuming while he wondered what Joe knew, where this was would lead.

“Don’t give me that look,” Joe said easily, smirking and taking another drag from his cigarette. “I’m a little bull-headed but I sure as hell ain’t dumb enough to have missed you two gabbin’ on the road last week. You were ‘bout as subtle as a white elephant in a lap. And while it wasn’t exactly against rules, I was disappointed all the same.” He leaned against a tree, his posture unreadable, expression hardening. “The thing ‘bout Billy, he ain’t got no branches on his family tree. No one to be loyal to but us. So, in case I’m still not makin’ myself clear, I’m gonna tell you again: he ain’t your friend.”

Carl quickly tried to avert his gaze, but the damage was done. The hurt was there.

“You ain’t gettin’ him in trouble. He knows the rules,” Joe said after a moment. “‘Long as he ain’t fuckin’ you, we’re square.”

 _Fucking._ Joe’s word, for what they did. Not sex. Carl didn’t know if there was a difference. Didn’t know if it would be Billy’s word. He didn’t want to think that Billy could do that to him, but he hadn’t asked.

“Never mind that, though. Whaddaya say we have a little story time?” Joe snickered suddenly, taking one last puff of his cigarette before abandoning it in the dirt, and sighing out gray smoke. “I’m gonna tell you ‘bout somethin’ we found back in Gainesville. A little thing, like you,” he began. “She was hidin’ in the back of a trailer, all alone, smellin’ bad enough to gag a maggot. Wasn’t much to look at, but she was warm, and didn’t put up much of a fight when we took our turns. Whined less than you did, that’s for fuckin' sure.”

Carl clenched his hands in his lap as a sheen of cold sweat slid down his back. He didn’t want to hear this.

“Thing is, this mangy dog, she tried to sneak off one night. Got a good little head start while we were sleepin’, and made it about a day’s walk before we found her by a river.” Carl sensed the dreamy smile in Joe’s voice as he took a beat to allow the words to sink in. “’Had her face to the water like a doe. Poor dumb thing never even heard me comin’ up behind her. She must’ve known it was me, though, when I stuck my boot into the back of her neck and put her under. Ain’t no one else would’ve gone through the trouble to show her the way.”

Carl released a shaky breath, trembling with the effort to keep himself together as Joe pushed away from the tree. Tears stung his eyes when Joe came to stand in front of him.

“You thirsty, dog?”

He shook his head.

“You sure? You been out all night. Must’ve worked up a sweat, runnin’ all over Hell’s half-acre back there.”

Carl shook his head again, swallowing, not knowing where to look. He was breaking. Forgetting what Billy told him. The tears he’d been fighting were dripping, fat and ugly, into the dirt.

Joe sighed. “Shit. That beaten bitch thing, it was cute that first night, and it might make my dick hard, but you’re not exactly tuggin’ at my heartstrings boy. Get yourself together. And get on your back. Let’s get this over with.”

Carl felt the fight in him fade. His muscles went weak and pliable. He shifted his legs out from under himself, and placed his hands in the dirt. He didn’t scream, or cry. Instead he absorbed himself in the feeling of the ground beneath his body as he settled down into it, pretending this wasn’t real. That it wasn’t happening. Not to him. Death was blue and eternal and inevitable, but not for him, because he was the exception, and this wasn’t happening.

Carl stared up at the cloudless sky as Joe stood above him, patient, and smelling like smoke, and leather. He eyed the mouth set in a line. The icy calm. Carl began to feel calm, too.

“Maybe I should have the boys have a go at you first,” Joe mumbled quietly, looking contemplative, the hands that should’ve been on Carl’s throat mysteriously lax at his sides. “It’s a waste that they don’t get their turn with you before you go cold.”

Carl blinked.

Something mentally struck him, as sharp and as fast as the slap of a hand.

_“Think about the things Joe says to you when you’re alone.”_

He forced himself to meet Joe’s eyes. Three words were there without needing to be spoken. Just three words. But Joe couldn’t meet him halfway, couldn’t show weakness, couldn’t verbalize that he had just given Carl an out, whether he knew or not, so Carl had to take the lead. His trembling lips parted.

“But I’m yours.”

Joe went noticeably still.

Carl maintained eye-contact. Reminded himself to breathe.

A haunting quiet followed, with Joe standing over him, large, mute, and pensive, and Carl on his back, awash with sweat, waiting for a reaction. The words felt suspended, palpable in the silence, but it was better than the alternative.

“Say again?” Joe asked lowly.

“I’m yours,” Carl repeated, stronger. “They can’t touch me. Because I’m yours.”

The words tasted like Joe’s flesh on his tongue. They were hot, pulsing, and could’ve gagged him, but he knew what he was doing. He formed his lips around it. Tried not to be sick when he searched Joe’s gaze for a modicum of sympathy, and instead found a quirk in the corners of his mouth.

“You really believe that, boy?” Joe pushed, dangerously gentle. “Tell me the truth. And try not to lie."

Carl nodded, careful to keep eye-contact as Joe regarded him with a tilt of his head. He was analyzing him, picking apart any nuances in Carl’s expression that would betray him. Carl was sure that there were plenty.

“See…” Joe said after a long, drawn out hesitation. “See, now I wanna believe that. Only thing is, we gotta loose end or two that’s tellin’ me you’re not bein’ entirely honest.”

Carl pushed himself up on his elbows, feeling his stomach his sink as Joe turned and walked back toward the trees. He watched him reemerge with the grass-stained tote bag bunched in his fist, a serious look on his face, one hand dipping inside as he approached.

“If you’re mine,” he began. “Then why you walkin’ around with this?”

Carl froze, panic setting back in when he watched Joe pull his father’s sheriff’s hat from the bag.

He couldn’t believe he’d forgotten it. He thought about the farm, the warm bed, the blood in his abdomen, the awkward tuck of the brim behind his head as his father laughed about getting it adjusted. That laughter had lessened a lot throughout the years, and it wasn’t there now, but Carl liked pretending that he heard it whenever the hat didn’t sit quite right on his head. _“We’ll pad the rim tomorrow, so it fits better.”_

“This is your dead daddy’s hat, right?” Joe asked, sauntering over to where Carl was slowly climbing up on to his feet, eyes now averted, threatened. “Yeah, this is your daddy’s hat. Dick definitely acted like some punk-ass, cowardly cop, through and through, so I ain’t bothered by this information. But see, I am bothered that you’re walkin’ around with this when you’ve been tellin’ me that you’re mine.” He stopped, an arm’s length way. “So, what’s the truth? You been lyin’ to me, like your daddy lied to me?”

Carl wanted to reach for it. Every second of being in that bungalow stung anew as he fought to keep his composure, at seeing the hat in his peripherals but not able to look _at_ it for fear that it’d give him away. He merely shook his head.

“You want it?”

He did. So badly it physically hurt. “No.”

“You sure? This is your daddy’s hat.” Joe held the hat out to him. “Why don’t you want it?”

Carl licked his dry lips, hands clenched to keep them from betraying him. “I’m not my daddy’s,” he whispered, the childish word revolting, clumsy as it rolled in his mouth. “I’m yours.”

Joe didn’t immediately retract it. He kept it held out, his offer that wasn’t an offer, tilting it, its metal band gleaming in the sunlight, its brim soft and notched from years of wear. Carl saw a version of himself developing separate of it. Something distant and incoherent. It was an ambiguous, comfortless, cold thing that didn’t feel like him, not yet, and he didn’t want it. But he had to choose.

So, when Joe gave him last chance to take it from him, to touch the fabric just one last time, to graze the band with his fingertips, cup the sinking crown, he didn’t. He just stood there, resolute. Falsely calm. Waiting.

And then Joe shrugged, and winged it over his head, into the stream.

 

* * *

  
  
  
He didn’t tell Carl to follow him when he left. He didn’t have to.

But some time, in between the whir of the sheriff’s hat tearing past his head and the sound of it gently hitting the water, Carl’s face hardened. He waited for Joe to turn his back before whispering,

“I win.”

 

* * *

  
  
  
_It was dark when Carl took the hoop out from under his pillow. He liked rolling it around in his hands, feeling the cool metal pinched between his fingers, giving him something to channel his anxiety into. Daryl hadn’t asked for it back, so Carl assumed it was okay that he kept it._

_Before he fell asleep, he tucked back under his pillow, and hoped he’d dream about circles, and snakes._

_Not the dead._

 


	7. speak

* * *

 

**_speak_ **

* * *

  
  
  
Something had significantly changed the day Joe returned with Carl, alive and unbound, in tow.

No one had been expecting him to come back. Their disgust was tangible in the pungent heat of the woods, and he could feel it on his skin when he and Joe approached the collapsed firepit, his head down, hands in fists, stone-faced to the audience of strangers that hoped he’d be dead. A brief glance at their faces told him that Billy had been right.

He was inconvenient. Incredibly, frustratingly, uncomfortably inconvenient. A mismatched cog to their machine. No one knew what do to with him. But everyone looked pissed.

Len was the only one with the temperament to storm right up to Joe, red-faced, shouting, shoving a finger into Carl’s face. He screamed that it wasn’t right. That Carl—“ _your fuckin’ dick suckin’ whelp_ ”—broke the rules. That Joe said he would handle it. Stick him. Show him the way. Len touched the knife on his belt too many times, got too close to Carl with his frustrated pacing, made too many threats that Joe apparently couldn’t ignore, and a minute later, Len was on his back, nose gushing blood.

Something had definitely, significantly changed. And with Len rolling in the dirt, bellowing and bloody, and Carl alive, planted at Joe’s side, the others could sense it, too.

He might’ve been mismatched, but he was part of their machine.

 

* * *

 

That night, their group came upon a boarded-up house at the far end of the tracks. Joe claimed a bedroom with horseshoe wallpaper and paintings of bulls on the walls, and told Carl to take off his clothes.

There were no mason jars inside that smelled like vinegar, intimate touches, or promises to “make it good.” He wasn’t gentle. It was a quiet, cerebral, painful reassertion of his claim, and Carl was never told to speak, but he felt compelled to say “ _I’m yours_ ” when it was over.

In the morning, Carl cleaned the blood off himself, and sat, uncomfortable and vacant-eyed, touching the bitemarks on his ears and shoulders.

He had ripped the heads off the bulls in the paintings, and used the staples in the wooden frames to scratch the words, _miles to go_ , into the antique headboard of the bed. His teeth were grit, a cold, flat anger creeping up inside of him like a shadow as he grazed the brands on skin, and he dwelled on it while not daring to touch his head, where he would not find his hat.

When Joe returned a short time later, carrying a ziplocked baggie half-full of dry cereal and a bottle of water, they hardly spoke. The sun was already high enough in the sky that it was almost time to leave again. The others could be heard downstairs making the last of their rounds when Joe walked up to him, Carl with a cheerio halfway to his mouth, with the mountain climbing rope in hand.

Carl reluctantly lifted his eyes and found Joe staring down at him, head tilted, a strange expression on his face. He didn’t immediately speak, and instead reached up and placed a hand on Carl’s jaw, and gently brushed a thumb over his cheek.

It felt affectionate, and it made Carl’s anger buckle. He nearly gave himself permission to forget about everything and just lean into that momentary display of kindness, that lone source of warmth emanating from the pads of Joe’s fingers and the slightly clouded look in Joe’s typically intense gaze, reaching for anything that wasn’t dehumanizing and indifferent. But it didn’t last. The grip on his face grew tighter, the edge in Joe’s wary eyes sharpened, and Carl’s own expression went hard again.

The atmosphere became heavy, like the silence in the wake of being scolded.

“It ain’t my job to lay out the rules again. You know your place. You know your part.”

Carl nodded.

“I don’t have to be nice to you. I don’t have to give you another chance. You pull that shit you did in the woods, and I’m leavin’ you to the dirt.”

Again, Carl nodded, his fists sliding into his lap. “I won’t.”

“Why’s that?”

Carl stared up at him, accepting the challenge posed by Joe’s tone, thinking, _because I’m stupid and helpless. Because my friends are probably dead. Because my family **is** dead. Because all I had left was his hat. Because you’ve taken everything._ He considered spitting at him. Risking another beating, or worse.

Instead, he eyed his shadow on the wall, and saw a black shape sitting with its shoulders bowed inward, its face forced up, and all edges. It was the alternate version of himself. That comfortless, cold thing.

He had chosen this.

“Because I’m yours.”

 

* * *

 

When the sun was up, Carl was a ghost. He was muted. Brimming with a quiet rage. Faded to the point of transparency. He followed whatever body happened to be grasping his lead, having little to say (and no one to say it to, even if he did—Billy hadn’t spoken a word to him since the clearing), and existing only long enough to settle onto whatever bed, patch of dirt, or tent floor he was expected to, when the sun went back down.

Every thought was bare and empty. Every action, down to the way his body had begun to automatically roll over onto its stomach when Joe approached him in the dark, was muscle memory.

He had experienced a fleeting sense of hope when they came upon trackside signs one day as they were returning to the railroad. They had just spent two days inside a rotting, dust-scented farmhouse that had nothing more to offer than a roof and a door, and they were becoming desperate for supplies, when a markered map, and the stark black words _TERMINUS_ , touched with a star, appeared on a post.

_SANCTUARY FOR ALL. COMMUNITY FOR ALL. THOSE WHO ARRIVE SURVIVE._

It’d seemed promising. Carl even briefly entertained the idea that he still had a chance. That there would be people there, who would help him.

But his hopes evaporated as they approached the roadside industrial complex, where there was a residual smell of smoke and burnt meat, ash still floating off the rooftops, and bodies freckling the charred and stained pavement.

Terminus was nothing more than a series of bullet-ridden boxcars. A shell of an outbuilding. A factory with broken windows and scorched brick. The only people present were littered along the ground, or stumbling, milky-eyed and yellow, around the complex. No sanctuary. No community.

When they stayed to inspect the inside of the main building, searching for food or water, they discovered tables covered in human limbs, crates of chemicals, and bone saws. One room had an aluminum trough in it filled with old blood, another had torsos, skinned down to the muscle and hanging from meat hooks, conspicuously placed near rows of industrial barbecues.

“We find the cats who did whatever the hell it is they’re doing here, we don’t show them no hospitality, right?” Tony had asked. “No way in hell we add a number to the group that’s sittin’ somewhere with this kinda meat in their belly. Can’t risk it. No way in hell.”

Joe had nodded and tapped the exposed bone of a dangling spine with his rifle. “’Not against that, but I think we’re already comin’ up on these peoples’ restitution,” he’d said. “Probably not much left for us to stick and leave for the wind.”

It was true. No one had been found. So, they left as they came, agitated and hungry, and paid little mind to Carl as he glanced back at one of the boxcars, where he swore he heard whispers.

 

* * *

 

It was autumn when Carl was faced with the threat of other people. They had known for days that they were being followed by a quiet presence masked by forests skirting the road, occasionally catching the flicker of a shadow, or the whisper of brush being passed through as they made their way down along a curving, backwoods path near Dahlonega, but it never approached them.

Their group had been heading north to see what was left of the mountain towns when nightfall came early. Joe found a stretch of abandoned cars, and Carl was shoved into the back of a broken-down Matador station wagon.

Joe had just finished, and left him to lie on the back seat to join the others a few feet away at a firepit just off the side of the road. It’d been cold. The balmy summer air had receded in favor of a bone-leeching chill that sank right through the worn, hole-ridden jacket Joe had claimed for him, and hard as he tried, the sound of his chattering teeth and the pain left in Joe’s wake made it impossible to sleep.

He lied staring vacantly into the backrest of the broken seat in front of him, knees pulled to his chest and hands tucked into his sleeves, listening to the muffled sound of laughter on the opposite side of road and the groan of the wagon in the breeze.

Carl hated not being able to sleep. With or without a body at his back, he thought too much in the dark. It became easy to lose himself to the past, to think about labor blood, empty carriers, bowie knives, and bull’s horns (the marks were still there, two perfect little dime-sized scars on the backs of his legs), but none of it fully surfaced of its volition. It needed help to fill in the spaces he now deliberately left blank. The spaces that housed his mom’s last words. The color of Judith’s eyes. The look on his father’s face when Lou stabbed him.

The memories would kill him if he allowed them to. So he didn’t.

It’d gotten late. The cold air had kept Joe by the fire longer than usual, and away from the back of the wagon where Carl had curled into himself and had finally begun to drift off. No one had been in proximity of the car to keep the people at bay—so, when one approached, and tapped the window over Carl’s head, they did it with smiling confidence.

“Hi there, little boy.”

Carl’s head had snapped up, and found a splayed hand against the dirty glass directly above him. Things happened quickly after that.

The lockless door broke open and he found himself being yanked out into the cold night air, pants still only half-buttoned and sinking on his hips, fingers tangled inside his sleeves, a palm over his mouth that smelled faintly like ash. A voice in his ear hissed for him to keep quiet. Then bodies crowded around him like a shield, and tried to force him into the trees.

It’d become second nature not to speak when there were hands on him, so no pleas or protests were uttered when the arm around his shoulders began to drag him into the blackness. He had relented, in a way, the same way he had relented to Billy that night he ran, or to Joe _every_ night afterwards, overcome with a dull acceptance, that whatever was going to happen was unpreventable.

Then, a shot rang off, and Carl had caught a glimpse of Harley over the hood of the wagon, rifle poised at the head over Carl’s shoulder.

What followed was a panicky, scrambling chaos as the people tried to duck down and usher him into the woods as more shots popped off into the night. Carl had tried to drop his weight into his legs, wanting to find the ground and cling to it, thinking that if nothing else it would keep him from getting shot. He was only there long enough to hear one final bullet whisk through the temple of a nearby stranger, feel the spray of blood on the back of his neck, and then there was the clatter of an empty gun being dropped into the dirt.

Someone had pulled him back up, using him as a human shield. Behind them both, a woman was begging to _just go_.

“You’re mad, I get it,” the man had shouted. “But we’re just out here, trying to survive, just like everybody else. Just like you. We’re not trying to step on your turf. We’re not trying to take anything important. This isn’t personal.” The man had taken a step back. The others, except for Len, a step forward. “They took our home, and our food. We’ve gotta eat. Everyone’s gotta eat. So just let us walk away. Let us have this one, and we’ll never cross paths again. I promise you.”

It didn’t quite connect, what the man was saying. Carl kept thinking about the fact that someone else’s blood was dripping down the back of his shirt. That all of this felt vaguely familiar. He hadn’t even been fully aware that one last bullet had popped off, and suddenly the arms around him had fallen away.

The person had been nicked in the shoulder and startled just enough for the others to take him and drag him out into the middle of the road.

Joe had come to Carl and run a hand over his face, wiping away the blood, checking for wounds, never asking him if he was okay but implying it with a surprising tenderness. His lips had connected with the crown of Carl’s head for the briefest moment, and then as the others began to beat the man to death, he’d hooked him into his arm, and forced him to watch.

“Look,” Joe had whispered savagely. “Look at what happens to road trash that fucks with us. Look at what happens to pieces of shit who try to my things. Look. This is for you, dog. This is all for you.”

_“Sshhh, keep watching daddy. Look at him. Look at daddy.”_

He’d looked. Saw and heard every bone-crunching collision. Every choked plea sopping with blood. Every sporadic twitch of muscle as the man’s brain collapsed when Billy launched a crowbar through his skull, and a red mist sprayed all over the dirt like a broken sprinkler.

He’d watched it all with a creeping warmth clawing its way into his stomach, that anger at _everything_ being sated by the sight of the violence, the blood, the suggestion of justice in a world that had offered him none.

Afterwards, Lou followed Joe’s suit, and asserted his claim over the woman who’d been left behind. She was only with their group for three days before she tried to run, and Lou beat her skull into a tree.

 

* * *

 

A month later, Carl had his first kiss inside the room of a gas station motel, just before the first snow.

They’d been driven to near-starvation after days of following a crumbling road at the base of the mountains. Carl, given the fewest rations, had been reduced to a heap on the pavement until Harley came and begrudgingly gathered him up into a makeshift piggyback, getting Joe’s permission only after the fact. Billy took the tail end of the group in his stead.

It wasn’t clear if it had always been a penchant of Harley’s to pick up the slack in places where Joe was too aloof or too exhausted to do it himself, but at some point, he had become the first one at Carl’s side when a walker stumbled into their path, the one who warned him when strangers were nearby, and the one who gripped the back of his shirt when a cold, primal instinct had him climbing onto the railing of an overpass.

It was Harley who stopped them at the foot of a sloping hill, where a rusting mail box and an old Coca-Cola advertisement had been staked into the gravel, and above them, a chain of gas pumps, a partially-collapsed convenience store, and a lodge with an old truck parked on its frosted lawn. He didn’t wait for permission to ascend the hill, and the others followed only after a brief hesitation.

Upon disposing of the lodge’s previous owners, a couple of meandering dead men lurching about the outdoor strip, their group took to the main office. Carl was dropped gracelessly into a swivel chair near the door, and left to sit with his chin to his chest until someone pressed the tip of a water bottle to his mouth, mussed his hair, and then left him to go back out into the cold to raid what remained of the store.

He expected them to return with nothing, and languidly sipped at his water with the belief that he wouldn’t have access to more. But when the door opened, and Joe’s booming voice filled the small office like oil in a drum, it became apparent that he was wrong.

Joe, trailed by Dan and Tony, entered with _crates_ of supplies that’d been stashed under the wreckage of the gas station.

Convenience snacks. Canned goods. Chocolate. Bottled drinks. Alcohol. Enough to allow them to settle, and maybe to carry them through the week.

They claimed their shares and sat in a circle on the thinly-carpeted floor, everyone laughing then, joking, visibly relieved after days of going hungry. Carl, still having difficulty lifting his head, had even opened his eyes to find a Big Cat dropped into the channel between his legs.

“For bein’ a good dog,” Joe had snickered quietly, nudging him when he glanced up, confused. “But don’t make me regret it. You give me a reason to beat your ass any time soon, and you’re not seein’ another candy bar for the rest of your years. Get it?”

Carl whispered his thanks, voice hoarse and breaking from the chill, and carefully tucked the candy bar into his pocket for safekeeping. Afterwards, he and the others indulged in their first meals in days, his share small but adequate—a handful of boiled peanuts, a pull-tab cup of applesauce, a strip of beef jerky, and a tin of tomato sauce that he split with Joe. He had just polished the peanut oil from his fingertips, feeling rejuvenated, unable to hide a small smile, when someone had suddenly shoved a plastic bottle in his face.

Carl had looked up to find everyone staring at him.

“Here.” Joe smirked, taking Carl’s spit-dampened fingers, and pressing them around the neck of the bottle. “We’re celebratin’, and the boys and I agree that it’s ‘bout time you had your first taste of bein’ pissed up.”

Len had snapped that he _hadn’t agreed to shit_ , but he was largely ignored, the focus now entirely on Carl as he awkwardly held the bottle near his face, nosed scrunched at the smell. He’d already decided that he wanted nothing to do with alcohol—Joe drank enough for the group as a whole, and the way it drew out his worst desires at night nearly drove Carl to vomit—but he couldn’t refuse it.

So, with a visible reluctance that momentarily caused Joe’s face to go dark, Carl lifted the mouth of the bottle to his lips, took a swig, and immediately began to cough.

The entire room lit up with laughter, and Carl quickly handed the bottle off, red-faced, choking on the medicinal-flavor of the liquid that felt like it was eating through his neck all the way down. It was nothing like the foamy sips of beer that Shane used to slip him when his mom wasn’t looking, or the little carbonated mouthfuls of champagne he’d sneak under folding tables on New Years.

But for reasons that failed him, Carl willingly took another swig of the bottle once it had been passed full-circle. And then he took another. And then another, until Joe had to pry it from him because “ _you weigh less than a house cat and have eaten half as much_ ,” and if the pink in Carl’s cheeks were any indication, he had already swallowed more than his fill.

A short time later, Carl found himself being pulled out into the freezing night air, to their claimed room at the far end of the strip. Dan had briefly followed them with hushed pleas to an inebriated Joe—“ _Let me borrow it! Just once! I ain’t gonna keep it! You had it this whole time, it ain’t right! I’ll be careful!_ ”—a strategy that never once got him more than the dismissive wave of a hand, but on this particular night, earned him an uncharacteristically confident, if unsteady, middle finger from Carl.

The look on Dan’s face broke him. He had burst out laughing, and didn’t stop even when he was yanked into the room (Joe’s grip on his arm had been firm but not painful—if he’d caught it, he didn’t seem to care), and the door closed behind him with the soft click of a latch.

Carl was still laughing when his back connected with the wall, and Joe suddenly closed the space between them, teeth finding his neck.

He hadn’t minded the way Joe pressed up against him then, his body warmth a relief in the frost-bitten chill seeping through the cracks in lodge’s frame, the knee being wedged between his legs a means of keeping him upright when he had every intention of hitting the ground. His hands found the lapels of Joe’s Sherpa jacket, and he sighed, feeling full, mellow, and steady inside the cocoon that Joe’s body made for him.

Something was said—something about Carl being a mongrel, a bitch, a boy, _his_ boy—and then, the first of a series of small, chaste kisses were pressed to his forehead, temples, the bridge of his nose.

Carl had promptly stopped laughing, and gone as still as he could manage. He frowned slightly.

They had never kissed before. Carl never thought that it was part of _fucking_ , that it was something reserved for people like his mom and dad, or Glenn and Maggie. People who loved each other. So, he took the feeling of Joe nosing the side of his face, peppering over the bitemarks he’d left in his jaw, with the expectation that he would be upset when Joe’s mouth finally found its way to his—upset at his own stupidity, his own naivety, at having yet another thing he would have to work out on his own.

But when Joe brushed his lips, touching the seam of his mouth with his tongue, Carl opened up for him without hesitation, and he plunged it inside.

Carl’s face immediately began to burn. He dug his fingers into the fabric of Joe’s jacket when he unintentionally began to slide back against the wall, a squirming, eager sensation settling in his stomach as Joe’s spongy and slick tongue filled his mouth, tasting like cigarettes, tomatoes, and the chemical burn of alcohol. He was slow to respond to the prodding against his own, even when Joe became more fervent, clutching his head, his hair.

Carl would later remember feeling like a warm puddle slowly forming on the floor as he dripped down the wallpaper, held up by nothing but Joe’s knee, and a prayer. He’d remember feeling giggly and placid, melting into that kiss and the squishy tongue inside of him, thinking vaguely of walker jaws, and wanting badly to laugh. And he’d remember that eager sensation in his belly slide lower, into his thighs, and his groin.

He wouldn’t remember pushing his hips up, seeking a pleasant friction against Joe’s leg. He wouldn’t remember _moaning_ when he found it.

And he wouldn’t remember waiting until Joe pulled away before he slipped a hand down to his own belt, and slurred in a voice cracking with puberty,

“I want it.”

 

* * *

 

That following morning, Carl found himself sitting with his chin perched on the windowsill, staring out at a foot of snow on the ground with a partially unwrapped Big Cat in hand.

It’d been a soft start, the outside muffled by the white flakes falling from the sky and the voices of the others silenced by the walls that separated them, and Joe had been sitting quietly with an old pornography magazine in his lap until Lou called him outside. Carl hadn’t watched him leave. They hadn’t spoken since he’d woke Carl with a series of strange, carefully placed kisses on his shoulders, an act that had mortified and confused Carl so badly that at the first opportunity, he escaped him by crawling out of the bed.

It was painful to try to wrap his head around any of it. _Fucking_. Sex. Kisses. The magazines didn’t explain anything in terms that he understood, didn’t show what he was experiencing, and they didn’t comfort him.

He puffed a breath against the glass in front of his face, and dully began to draw shapes in the fog, watching Joe on the other side, and Tony motioning toward a strip of buildings. Carl suspected that they planned on raiding the area. There were supermarkets, family clinics, and abandoned homes just east of the lodge, and regular runs could keep them fed and healthy long after the snow melted. They could be set for weeks. Months.

Carl pictured himself being confined to that room, never leaving the bed, never clothed, never off his knees, and frowned. It sounded horribly claustrophobic. And lonely.

He glanced up when a body moved for the door. Billy entered, gaze averted, trailed by the biting cold and the sounds of muttering voices until the door closed.

“Get dressed, little man,” he said, eyes flickering to the pile of clothes sitting near the foot of the bed. “You and I are gonna be hanging out for a few hours while the guys go scouting.”

“You’re not going with them?” Carl murmured, ignoring Billy’s request, turning back to the window, and lazily taking another bite of his Big Cat. He watched the others begin to disperse, their bodies hunched in the snowfall. His mouth twisted bitterly. “You’re not gonna have anything to claim if you babysit me. Just go.”

Billy threw his jeans at him before heaving a sigh, and falling back on the bed. Carl scowled. “Yeah, well, not everything’s about you, little man,” Billy mumbled from behind him. “My ankle’s not really feeling another day’s worth of hiking around a ghost town filled with rotters.”

“Go to your own room then.”

“Jesus, you’re grouchy when you’re hungover,” Billy muttered, an eyeroll in his voice as Carl begrudgingly tugged his jeans on. “Relax. Okay, so Joe’s still not really into the whole idea of leaving you totally on your own, so what? Just pretend I’m not here. Go back to…” Carl heard the bed squeak as he motioned. “whatever it is you’re doing, and be glad he’s gone, ‘cause he’s gonna be cold and grumpy as hell when he gets back.”

Carl slipped back into his shirt, and a shabby, blood-stained puffer jacket, large enough to swallow him as he tucked himself back beneath the window. He decided that he felt safer with his face hidden. Less on edge. “Maybe he won’t come back.”

Billy chuckled. “Yeah, I wouldn’t bank on that, little man.”

Carl propped his chin on his arm, glowering as he trailed his finger back over the glass, retracing the bull’s horns he’d drawn above Joe’s head, the series of circles, the stars, a stick figure horse. His jaw was tight, tense with the buzzing ache in his head. There was an inexplicable irritation at sharing a space with Billy again. He refused to face him as he sourly grumbled out, “If you have to be in here, then you shouldn’t talk to me. You might get beat.”

“Is that what’s up your ass?” Billy asked nonchalantly. “That I haven’t been talking to you?”

Carl scoffed. “No. Why the hell would I want to talk to you? I already told you, you’re an asshole. You should j _us_ t—" Carl froze, his voice cracking, letting out one obnoxious _squeak_ into the quiet just before his mouth abruptly shut. He blushed and glared downward.

“How long’s that been going on?”

Carl shrugged, and raised his hand back to the window, feigning interest in the big, ugly x’s he swiped over Billy’s reflection. “I don’t know. Why?”

“’Think you know why.”

Carl’s fingertip went still. He stared out at the rows of dusted white pine trees and gable rooftops, expecting Joe to emerge from one or the other to throw Billy out, put an end to that conversation, and seal him up in that cold, creaking tomb. It sounded preferable to the tension he sensed in Billy’s gaze at his back when he shifted tighter against the wall, trying to hide his flushed face as he snapped, “Stop talking to me. You’re not allowed.”

“Little man,” Billy sighed. “I’m going to need you to stand up.”

“You can’t tell me what to do.”

“Little man,” he repeated firmly. “I’m serious. Stand up, and turn around.”

Carl huffed petulantly, a scowl on his face as he reluctantly pushed away from the window, and climbed to his feet. He turned and was surprised to find Billy sitting up, eyes narrowed, examining him. Staring at his limbs. His cheeks. His jawline. Immediately, Carl froze, standing with his arms at his sides, baring everything—the belt that was on its last notch, the shirt that rode up slightly on his stomach, the jeans that didn’t quite reach his ankles.

By the time Billy’s gaze found his, Carl felt drained, and vulnerable. His anger was replaced with a grim apprehension.

“Why didn’t I notice all this before?” Billy asked quietly.

Carl shifted, and crossed an arm over himself insecurely. “I dunno… Jackets. Layers. I’ve been wearing my pants lower.”

“Little man,” Billy whispered with raised brows. “You _can’t_ try to hide this from him.”

“I’m not,” Carl argued. “He knows… He just hasn’t said anything.”

“Nothing at all?”

Carl looked down at the floor, his fingers fidgeting with the hem of his jacket. A memory of being hungry and cold in the woods, his naked body straddling Joe’s lap on the forest floor as Joe took inventory of what remained of his baby fat, his curves, the places that hadn’t angled, stretched, developed hair, settled like an anchor in his gut. Joe had said absolutely nothing at the time. Just stared at him with an expression that had made Carl feel like he should apologize.

“No. So… I don’t know what it means. He seems okay right now, and I think I’m still passable,” Carl murmured, unable to look up, his cracking voice lowering with the weight of his words. “but everything’s getting awkward. And I don’t know what he’s gonna do when he realizes how bad it is.”

“How bad is it?” Billy asked.

“I don’t know,” Carl frowned, face beginning to burn, unable to articulate that, sometimes, his growing limbs got tangled in Joe’s when he was beneath him. That he was contorting himself to hide the fact that outgrowing the nook in Joe’s body. That he was experiencing an influx of feelings and sensitivities that may or may not have manifested, soaked in alcohol, the night before. So, instead, he simply nodded to a pair boots abandoned near the doorway, still fidgeting as he did so. “He just got me those… They already hurt my feet. I don’t… I don’t think I should ask for new ones.”

Billy made a face, considering him, his expression suggesting that he knew there was more than what Carl was saying. “Well, ask. You won’t need them for a while, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t know.”

“What do you think he’ll do?” Carl asked softly.

“In the long-run?”

“Yeah.”

“Beats me.” Billy shrugged and leaned back, that frustrating ease slipping back into his posture, his words. “This is new ground, I told you that. I mean, it was weird enough when he took you for himself, weirder when he kept you for a solid week, and weird _est_ when he didn’t follow through and win one for the reaper when you took off. That doesn’t happen. Or, it didn’t. Still doesn’t, I guess, if you count Lou’s girl.” He glanced toward the window, contemplative, eyeing the field of white that was bodiless and still. “Most of the guys think that when something stops serving its purpose, you throw it away, because there’s no point in carrying extra baggage. Not when you move around as much as we do. So… if Joe teeters on it, they might push him.”

Carl stared at his feet, suddenly wishing that he hadn’t risen, hadn’t bared himself to Billy, hadn’t asked that question. He quickly zipped up his jacket. “It doesn’t matter,” he grumbled. “Joe does what he wants. He’s not going to listen to anyone else unless they make it sound like it was his idea in the first place.”

“That how you got out of being turned into worm food?”

Carl’s hands slid defensively into his pockets. “I guess.”

“Smart move.” Billy cocked his head before a thoughtful look crossed his face. Carl happened to catch his eye, and found a glint of seriousness beneath his irritating composure, his quirked lips falling ever-so-slightly. “So, I’ve been meaning to ask. What happened that day by the creek, anyway?”

Carl’s brows furrowed. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. You went with him, all tears and vomit, and came back with nothing behind the eyes. It must’ve been bad.”

Carl stood staring at him for a moment, thrown. “I won,” he said simply.

Billy studied him, looking like he wanted to say something else, but didn’t. Instead, he uttered a, “ _huh_ ,” and then shifted back up onto the bed, seemingly abandoning the topic altogether, and leaving Carl to stand in a strange silence that felt inappropriate for the things that still needed to be said. Carl slowly sank back to the floor.

Time passed slowly after that. Billy leafed through the nauseatingly graphic magazines left on the end table. Carl dropped his aching head into his hand and played with the frayed ends of his jeans. Neither of them spoke for what felt like far too long, and Carl was unsettled. By his own feelings. His disappointment. His increasing, inexplicable sadness.

It may well have been hours later that Carl finally, reluctantly dragged his gaze back up to Billy, and forced himself to ask,

“Why _did_ you stop talking to me?”

Billy looked over at him, but didn’t immediately answer. Instead, he carefully considered the question, eyes leaving Carl’s long enough to heave a long sigh. “I don’t think you need me to answer that.”

Carl’s nose scrunched, his head lifting from his palm. “Is it because of the rules?”

“Something like that.”

“But you’re breaking them right now.”

“Not really.” Billy dismissively returned to his magazine. “But, just to give you a heads up, he’s probably going to check you out when he gets back. It’s not going to be comfortable but it’s better than him just dwelling on the idea that I tried something.”

Carl’s posture went stiff. He crossed his arms over his knees and looked down at the floor, thinking, in some way, of Joe’s words—“ _Long as he ain’t fuckin’ you, we’re square._ ”—as he hesitantly considered his next question. His fingers locked together to keep from fidgeting, and tentatively, he asked, “Would you?”

“Would I what?”

“Try something.”

Billy’s hesitation was a physical presence in the room. Carl couldn’t meet his gaze. Couldn’t stop staring at his own white knuckles, on the verge of asking him again, when, in a curt, deceivingly calm voice, Billy simply said, “No.”

“Have you ever wanted to?”

Billy frowned, sitting up. “I wanted to give you an out, remember?”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Billy chewed his lip, staring hard at him as they locked eyes, his own shoulders rigid as he visibly contemplated a lie, then decided against it. “…Yeah. I’ve thought about it.”

“So why haven’t you?”

“You’re not my claim.”

Carl balked at him, his brows drawn together, mouth in a line.

For too long it had been hard for him to reconcile the things he’d heard from Joe with the easy-going, well-spoken person at his side on the road. But Billy was also one the voices shouting in the bungalow. The one who dragged him back when he finally escaped. And that person in the trailer…

_“A little thing, like you… she was warm, and didn’t put up much of a fight when we took our turns…”_

_**We.** _

Carl stared into his eyes only long enough to confirm that he was telling the truth. To find that suggestion of an apology—those damn, meaningless words, _I’m sorry_ situating themselves in the space between them—before a glare overtook his face once more. He turned back to the window, and pretended not to notice when Billy seemed on the verge of speaking again.

A few minutes later, several bodies appeared on the horizon.

 

* * *

 

That night, Carl sat at the edge of the bed with his hands folded in his lap, staring at his boots on the floor, waiting for Joe to return from a meeting in the office. There’d been no explanation for why this meeting was called. If it had anything to do with their run. If something was wrong. It should have made him anxious, and it did, but only because it was delaying something important, leaving him alone with his thoughts, with the echoes of his conversation with Billy, and with the sight of his shoes that did not fit sitting in a heap by the door.

_“You won’t need them for a while, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t know.”_

Carl drew his bottom lip between his teeth, steeling himself for a question he didn’t want to ask, dreading the reaction, and the answer, if he got one at all. It was more likely that Joe would force him to make eye-contact, a thumb digging into his chin to hold him still, using that voice that _sounded_ calm, and composed, but was riddled with warning. “ _Now why would you go and ask a question like that?_ ”

Carl took a breath, pulled his jacket tighter around himself, and watched the door until he heard footsteps on the strip. It was only moments later that Joe entered with a tired, disgruntled look on his face, hair wet from the snow. He offered Carl a quick glance before beginning to strip out of his damp, weighted layers.

“You looked wide-eyed as a mounted doe, and tense as one that’s got a bullet coming,” he said absent-mindedly, sitting on the opposite end of the bed to remove his boots. “If you think you got somethin’ to say, give it another thought, ‘cause I’m no mood after listening to you whine when I was making sure my claim was still mine.”

Carl’s face grew hot, struck with the sense memory of being bent over, of being prodded, having his face shoved into the musty-smelling bedsheets when the words " _I’m yours"_ defensively came spilling out of his mouth like a bad reflex. He hadn’t anticipated the extent of inspection, what Billy had nonchalantly referred to as just being “checked out,” and the act, and subsequent interrogation, had left him shaken in the way that _fucking_ used to shake him.

Carl swallowed uncomfortably. He watched Joe rise to remove more layers, a small, tingling warmth swirling with a tight sensation in his belly, fingers restlessly curling and uncurling inside of his sleeves. He cleared his throat, and looked at the floor.

“I do have something to say,” he mumbled, instinctively knowing to look downward when Joe glanced back at him, ensuring he didn’t look argumentative, challenging, defiant.

“Oh?” Joe asked, dropping his shirt at the foot of the bed, head tilted slightly, a brow raised. “Well, shit. I sure hope it’s important. ‘Cause I can tell you now, there’s nothing I like less than listening to a yappy bitch after a long day.” He walked over and stood before him, frowning when Carl hesitated. “Well? You got somethin’ to say, spill it. Go on. Speak.”

Carl lifted his eyes, uncertain that he was supposed to, that he should be saying anything at all that wasn’t an apology.

“My shoes…” he managed to utter. “They don’t… fit anymore.”

Joe’s frown deepened, creases appearing in his forehead as he took a step back. “Get up.”

Carl did as he was told, slipping off the bed with heavy legs, his heart thumping when Joe moved to take his place and pull him forward.

Bare again. He could look away, and still _feel_ Joe’s eyes on the visible goosefleshed skin just below his naval, the ride of his jeans on his hips, his ankles. He tried to fixate on the area rug beneath his feet when Joe pushed his puffer jacket away, and slid his hands up along his neck, touched the sharpening angle of his jaw. They lingered there before falling to his hips, where his thumbs, still cold, gave him a jolt when they disappeared under the hem of his shirt.

“My little boy’s not gonna be so little soon, is he?” Joe asked quietly.

Carl anxiously licked his lips, wishing that he could take a step back. Unable to speak, he simply shook his head.

“What do I then?” Joe’s thumbs brushed his skin as he paused, gaze falling to his waist. “What do I do, when you stop being little, and soft?”

Carl’s face twisted as Joe’s hands drew up under his shirt, his icy palms dragging along his hips, stomach, his breath catching when they passed over his chest. His body involuntarily tried to shrink back, but Joe abruptly held him in place, and squeezed his sides to caution him.

“I’m gonna tell you somethin’, and you better be listening, ‘cause this is true,” Joe began lowly, his grip only softening when Carl went completely still. “’Far as I’m concerned, so long as you’re warm and you do as I say, we’re not gonna have any problems. You be a good boy, you keep my sheets from getting cold, and I’m gonna keep my knife out of your little head. I’m gonna keep you safe. You understand?”

Carl wanted to nod, but he was distracted by Joe’s hands, the chill of his skin waning, becoming hot. His cracking voice was barely a whisper when he said, “Yes.”

“Starting tomorrow, we’re gonna cut your rations, divide ‘em amongst the boys,” Joe continued, smirking slightly when he gave Carl another squeeze, and he began to slide his fingers into the waistband of his jeans. “We’ll start with Harley. Can’t keep expecting him to watch after my dog, not without a little incentive that doesn’t involve that mouth of yours. After that, Billy. He’s been good. Hasn’t put his dick where it doesn’t belong, hasn’t been sneakin’ around my back… You’ll be hungry. But you’ll be staying little for a bit longer.”

Carl could barely hear what he was saying, couldn’t register that Joe had just threatened to starve him even further in some horrible attempt to stunt his growth. Deaf with that hum that was in his ears again, his vision was tunneling while he watched Joe remove his belt, and pop the button of his jeans.

“My little boy,” Joe crooned, lips quirked as he watched Carl swallow again, fingers at his zipper. “You remember dry-fucking my leg last night?” He pulled it down. “You remember telling me how much you wanted it, with that squeaky little fuckin’ voice of yours?”

Warmth was traveling into his waist. His hips. His thighs. An alarm was sounding in his head, but he couldn’t move, didn’t want to. He tried to keep his breathing even and steady when Joe dipped a hand into his pants, and his palm pressed against him, fingers curling, filling every inch of him with an overwhelming, unbearable heat. He closed his eyes. Struggled to keep upright when his legs began to shake, and go numb.

“Tell me you want it again. Tell me who you belong to.”

Joe began to massage him, pressing until instinct had Carl leaning into it, his thighs tensing and his stomach swirling with that eager sensation again. He became lightheaded. Shivered when Joe stroked him. He wanted to climb up onto him, to get off the awkwardly growing legs that were threatening to give out, to ride it, thrust into it until his belly hurt and his insides vibrated, but he didn’t dare move. Instead, he breathed out a plea, and Joe snickered.

“Just say the words.”

_“Carl. Say the lines.”_

Carl shook his head, heart hammering against his ribs, skin tingling. He clenched his jaw as Joe’s damp palm tightened over him, the pad of his thumb sliding over his head. Joe’s opposite hand slipped around Carl’s back to coax him forward.

“Say it.”

When he was nearly flush against him, Carl caved, allowing his lulling forehead to fall against Joe’s until he could smell his sweat, his hair, his hot breath against his face. The words were there. There was no hesitation when they emerged. No second-thoughts. No voices interrupting, no memories cracking the shell of his composure, nothing but a paralyzing heat that made him feel as though he were coming apart as he whispered, “I want it.”

And then Joe leaned up, kissed him, and pulled him onto the bed.

 

* * *

 

They spent six weeks situated in that creaking wooden lodge tucked up on that sloping hill. No one bothered them—people traveled south in cold weather, and walkers kept primarily to the woods, or to the scenic little town to the east—and game animals and supplies were plentiful.

At times, it felt like playing house, sitting inside four walls for an indefinite period of time, safe from the dead, being so certain of the next meal, and the peace of it left many of the others on edge. Carl had watched their weekly runs became daily runs, their alcohol dry up, and their in-fighting escalate to Tony choking Len out on the strip just outside the window.

Of all of them, Billy handled it the worst. He grew increasingly volatile over the course of their stay. Became louder. Argumentative. Punched the walls. Carl began waking in the middle of the night to the sound of him pacing outside, or to the sight of him disappearing into the woods, carrying an armful of blankets and a sleeping bag, not returning until the next day. “He’s feral as a damn barn cat,” Joe explained one night. “Try to house him like a tabby, and he’ll turn into a tiger.”

In some way, they were all feral, the safety of the lodge feeling more and more like imprisonment—for Carl, especially.

Carl had been right to think that Joe would never let him leave. He was confined to his room, starving and isolated, unable to speak to anyone that wasn’t Joe, unable to step a foot outside without his escort, and sometimes left with a wrist tied to the headboard if he seemed especially restless. There was no Billy to keep him company. No one else that had an excuse, like a lame ankle, to stay behind.

The solitude felt like death. It was suffocating in how excruciatingly empty and silent it was, and it seemed to go on forever— _that profound nothingness_ —and Carl had moments where he lost his grip on reality, waking with the belief that he was somehow back in the prison, swearing he could smell summer grass and lemonade, or scrambling when he thought he heard Judith’s coos.

His only escape manifested in the sensations that erupted in his body at night, when Carl would ask for it, and Joe would respond by sliding a hand between his legs, opening him up, and filling him until that warmth numbed away the threat of empty blue eyes on a hardwood floor.

 

* * *

 

When the frost melted, they returned to the road. Billy calmed and returned to his relaxed, easy-going self, the others’ arguments minimalized, and Joe seemed to have forgotten the leash behind.

They scavenged what was left of the mountain towns before backtracking and picking off the southwestern suburban neighborhoods and cities, where there were scuffles in cul-de-sacs with furious survivors, shoot outs with deranged maniacs, and escapes from the hordes of the dead that banged outside car windows and supermarket doors.

Their safe havens were stretches of small communities that had begun to be established in housing developments, just outside of the main cities. Joe would send Carl out to wander the private roads, to hold himself like he was injured, to hunch in an attempt to appear smaller, and to cry for help until the awful charade had people abandoning their hiding places, foregoing every instinct that told them otherwise.

The poor, stupid people that fell for it were always painfully compassionate, reassuring, kind, some to the point that Carl would be on the brink of warning them just as their hands reached his face ( _lemons._ The first time he ever did it, the person’s hands smelled like lemons), but no sooner had they been there, consoling him, than they were ripped away, gutted, and their homes raided.

Sometimes, these raids led to new claims, to women and children being dragged like animals down the tarmac as Carl blankly looked on. He never knew their names. Never asked.

Once, there had been a boy about his age, with big green-blue eyes and dirty blond hair, who they’d found tucked in a toolshed behind a duplex. He was unique in that he was hostile, stubborn, and impressively insubordinate in a way the others never had been. He fought when Tony claimed him, took every beating standing up, and screamed until he was hoarse when they were _fucking_.

One time he tried to speak to Carl when the others weren’t around, offering up a name Carl didn’t want to hear—“ _I’m Ron._ ”—asking questions he wasn’t allowed to ask, pleading with him, trying to get him to undo his restraints.

Carl’s response had been a deafening silence. Then, one day, Ron just disappeared.

 

* * *

 

Others—stragglers, marauders, criminals—came and went, arriving with guns and ugly intentions as they observed the decimation in Joe and others’ wake, and escaping after their first beating. Some simply vanished without explanation. A few lingered for as long as it took for the seasons to revert, having learned to play the part, knowing to whom they could speak (most knew to keep their distance from Carl, and from the others without proper names), what they could claim, how they fit into the motley group of scavengers Joe and his group had put together.

For most of it, Carl was disinterested, and uninvolved, his existence defined by the space he shared with Joe. No one outside of this space had any right to him. No one, who had some bare understanding of the system, who saw him standing, stunted and nameless, at Joe’s side, would try. He was kept safe, just as Joe had promised. But all of this changed the day their group took in a wandering drunk by the name of Pete Anderson.

 

* * *

 

The day he met Pete, it was Carl’s third autumn among the people he had stopped considering strangers. They had been staying at what remained of a lakeside summer camp down south, where they had access to game animals, fish, boats, clothing, and cabins that curled around the ring of the lake.

Joe had claimed himself and Carl a hut tucked near the trees with a hidden supply closet stuffed with extra blankets that Carl could cut up and turn into insulation. It was a project that kept him busy on days where he felt too stagnant, when the nervous energy still buzzing from their travels had his hands twitching.

On that particular day, he had been tearing through a series of ugly, checkered comforters he’d dragged out onto the porch, watching as the others mulled about the camp. Joe had been missing since dawn, having left with Len on a hunting trip to find what animals still inhabited the surrounding wood. Harley, as he often did when Joe wasn’t present, lingered in his stead just beyond the edge of Carl’s cabin, dragging his rifle, passing glances toward him, mumbling through only partially-opened lips to a few newcomers loitering about.

There weren’t many. Six or seven, most of them needy, obnoxious types that took to their group looking for structure, for better opportunities leading to food or shelter as summer winded down. Most kept to themselves, but a few made the mistake of wandering in his direction, guilty of little more than simple curiosity (Carl was the only claim that autumn, the only teenager in a group of men), and they had to be warned.

One in particular was a man with shiny brown hair and a gentle, but wary, disposition. Carl regularly saw him stop and ask questions just outside his line of hearing, and make hesitant attempts to approach him when he was alone, only to be intercepted by one of the others. Sometimes the man waved if they made eye-contact, and smiled if Carl reluctantly waved back. The man was dumb to do it, but he wasn’t malicious, and he knew enough to keep his distance when the others were nearby.

Carl was in the process of ripping old, wiry stuffing from a water-stained blanket, using a pocketknife to break the seams, when he happened to look up and see Joe and Len emerging from the woods.

But they weren’t alone.

Carl frowned and set his things aside, then moved to stand at the hut’s bannister as Joe and Len approached, trailed by yet another newcomer. A man, nearly half a foot taller than Joe, with wide shoulders, blond hair, a rifle in hand and the carcass of a dead dog being dragged behind him. There was something in his fist that he handed off to Joe once they reached the edge of the camp, and then he was directed to a communal building away from the trees.

The man happened to glance back as Joe was approaching their hut, caught Carl staring at him, and grinned.

 

* * *

 

“Where did you find him?” Carl asked, fidgeting with the spring of a handgun on the floor. He looked up when Joe brushed by him to sit on the bed.

“Little further east, near the roads,” Joe mumbled, turning on a battery-powered lantern on an end table, the wooden frame of the bed creaking under his weight. “Came wandering up to us, looking like he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. Started claimin’ he got separated from his family a couple of summers ago, and that he’d just ditched some group on the east coast.”

Carl looked back at him, setting the spring down on an oil cloth littered with gun fragments. “Why did he leave?”

“Didn’t say, so I didn’t ask."

“You’re not worried?”

Joe sighed and pushed the gray-white curls of hair from his eyes, looking vexed, already done with the conversation. “You wanna go down and have yourself a chat with Pete, play twenty questions with him, you go on ahead. But today’s not the day you push me.”

Carl made a face and lowered his head, placing the handgun components in a small plastic pale near his hip to be reassembled in the morning. He pushed himself up from the floor and moved to set the pale on a shelf against the far wall, where a couple of magnums, a rifle, and a few hunting knives sat on display. Carl’s own pocketknife rested on the lowest shelf, a dull, ugly thing with a seafoam-green handle and bits of thread caught in its spring.

Joe had given it to him not long after their second winter, when they’d tried to take up refuge in a rain-rotted camper abandoned near a quarry, and nearly gotten mauled. Six walkers had been locked inside. Dozens of others were wandering the area when the gunfire drew them close. Carl had gotten separated from the others in the chaos. When they later found him, he’d been dazed, and splashed with the sticky blood of a walker whose head he caved in with a boulder.

It was the following day Joe had slipped that pocketknife into his hand, warningless, threatless, offering nothing more than a firm mention that the knife was his only in the daylight.

Carl touched the butt of the knife with a slight smile on his face, taking a moment dwell on the memory, then went to set the pale down a center shelf. He’d just begun to tuck it on the ledge when something caught his eye.

“Joe?” he asked, brows furrowed. “What is this?”

“What’s what?”

Carl pulled a handgun he didn’t recognize from its place near a bracket, and frowned at the unfamiliar weight of it in his hands. It was a 9MM. Black, with a glossy barrel and a wooden grip that had something carved into it. “This gun,” he said quietly. “I don’t remember this one.”

Joe sighed and came up behind him, his fingers finding his hips as he grumbled, “You really are twenty questions tonight, aren’t you?”

Carl ran a thumb over the engraving in the gun’s handle, trying to discern what it was in the dim light of the room. He remained steady when he felt Joe’s hands slip under his shirt, fixating on the smooth walnut grip even when the warm tip of Joe’s nose nuzzled into the back of his ear. “Can I have it?”

“You? A gun?” Joe snickered quietly, his teeth finding his earlobe, his fingers sliding down along the dip in his hipbones as he pulled him closer. “Just what the hell do you think you’d do with a gun, besides waste my bullets missin’ the broad side of a barn?” He began to press his lips into the crook of Carl’s neck, a hand reaching for his belt, when he suddenly paused. “This have something to do with one of the boys? Someone stickin’ their hands where they shouldn’t?”

Carl quickly shook his head. “No, nothing like that,” he murmured, voice lowering when Joe slid back against him, and began to unlatch his belt. “I just… used to be a good shot. I could re-learn, you know. I could… go hunting with you… Be… a lookout…”

Words started to fail him when Joe’s hand slid down along the inside of his thigh, teasing the flesh until Carl began to go slack, and tried to seek it out. The distraction had the gun nearly slipping out of his fingers before Joe used his freehand to take it from him, and put it back.

“There’s no way in hell you’re getting a gun.”

“A better knife, then,” Carl whispered, withholding a moan when Joe’s fingers finally found him, and he reflexively began to push backward—looking for that familiar prod at his back. A prickly sensation slid down his spine when he found it, and then he felt himself being tugged away from the shelf, toward that creaking bed. “I can… I can be helpful,” he tried. “T-Take me with you, when you… go out…”

Joe pulled him back until they were just at the edge of the bed, one of his hands sliding their jeans down so that they were both exposed, and Carl could feel the slick head of his shaft against his skin. Carl’s head slumped back against Joe’s shoulder when his hands found the inside of his thighs, and he began to spread his legs, his heart rate spiking, palms reaching for the mattress.

“You’re starting to sound like Billy,” Joe snickered, his voice a vibrating rumble in the shell of Carl’s ear. “Actin’ as restless as a damn fawn. Maybe I should start tying you to the bed again.”

Carl bit his lip, shuddering when a hand slipped between them, and Joe adjusted himself so that he was grazing the sensitive nerves of his entrance. “At… at least Billy gets t… o… go out,” he breathed, bracing himself when Joe began to press him down, unprepared, unstretched, instinct driving him to try to shift his hips away. Joe held tight, fingertips digging into his skin, effortlessly easing him downward until his body found purchase.

“ _Fuck_.”

Carl went stiff, perspiration gathering along the surface of his shoulders, his mouth falling open. For several seconds, he didn’t so much as breathe.

“You ain’t Billy…” Joe sighed. “You ain’t one of my boys… Hunting ain’t your job. _This_? This is your job.”

Carl began to tremble. He swallowed, searching for air as Joe remained still, giving him the time he needed to adjust as he sat rigid in the hot flesh of his lap. A few stray tears dripped down his chin until Joe lifted a hand to brush them away, and then slid it down, toward the inside of his leg to touch him, to try to force Carl to relax against the searing burn in his body.

“I-I… I just… can’t…” Carl whispered, gulping in a deep, shaky breath when Joe’s sweat-dampened palm finally found him again, pressing up against his shaft, drawing blood and heat into his waist. He started to get lightheaded, placid, his spit-slickened lips parting to exhale a moan before he uttered, “Can’t… be alone… all the time… P… Please…”

Joe chuckled breathily into his shoulder, placing a few, feather-light kisses along a trail of healing bitemarks just above his collarbone. “Tell you what,” he said lowly. “You keep your mouth shut for the rest of the night, not ask me one more damn question, and I’ll find you somethin’ to do tomorrow.”

Carl nodded, a smiled daring to pull at the corners of his lips before Joe suddenly and violently thrust into him. His nails burrowed into the frayed edge of the mattress as he jerked forward, tears springing back into his eyes, a horrible filing sensation being driven up inside of him as Joe’s hips pumped against his body, and a hand stroked between his legs.

It would be a while before he would be able to relax enough to accept the pressure, to want to push back against Joe’s thrusts and find that spot inside of himself that made him numb with that debilitating, euphoric warmth. But even when he did, he still found his eyes traveling back to the shelf, to the place where the gun with the walnut handle sat, half-buried in the shadows.

The engraving on it…

He swore it’d looked like a baseball bat.

 

* * *

 

The next day, Joe decided to take him out into the crisp, yellowing woods to teach him how to make snares. There’d been a cluster of rabbit burrows half a mile west of the camp that had been partially hidden by a dip in the terrain, and the solitude of it left Carl feeling serene. Calm. He spoke softly when Joe showed him how to use saplings and channels to catch rodents, and he stepped gently on the forest floor when Joe led him around fox dens. It was possible, to him, that if he made too much of a disturbance, he would never be allowed out there again.

He was bent over, planting a peg into the ground through which he could tie a cord made from old shoelaces, when Joe came up behind him to examine his work.

“Keep it short,” he said. “You want the sapling to bend at ninety-degrees. Fuck it up, and it won’t hold.”

Carl nodded, a small, tickly sensation gathering under his skin when Joe began to teach him how to knot the cord, how to measure the noose, where to place the bait. There was something so captivatingly _normal_ about being with Joe like that, simply watching him work, being a part of it, having things explained to him with certainty that he would understand and use it.

They ended their trip with Carl sliding to his knees, unbidden, his stomach coiling with emotions he’d never been taught how to process, and left shortly thereafter.

Over the course of the next few weeks, Carl would be shaken awake to check their traps, set up new ones, and scout the area for more burrows. Before they went back, Carl would thank Joe in the only way he knew how.

Most paid them no mind when they left, and the only person who seemed even partially curious was Billy, who nudged him one day to ask if everything was alright. It was, after all, common by then for claims who went into the woods to not always be brought back.

But everything _had_ been alright. Carl had been given a new routine, something that gave him a purpose beyond waiting to be shoved to his hands and knees. It was a distraction. A glimpse of normalcy.

And still… something had been bothering him.

Every morning, Carl saw the broad-shouldered newcomer sitting at the edge of the docks, sipping on a bottle, watching them leave. It didn’t matter the time. Pete always found a way to have a drink in hand, to be present and awake when Carl was led into the trees, glancing back, meeting eyes that were a strangely familiar shade of green-blue. He always grinned. Always looked a little mean, something awful and knowing in the sneer he offered when Carl returned with pink lips, disheveled hair, smelling like Joe.

Carl tried to ask Joe again, just where Pete came from. Why he left his old group. If that gun, with the baseball bat carved into its grip, had been his.

His answers were never answers. Never more satisfying than, “Relax, boy. The new world’s left nobody clean. Ain’t no such thing as a clear conscious for men like us.”

Carl didn’t know anything about Pete’s conscious. If he was any better or worse than the others. If he came from the same breed of violence that Joe did. But he didn’t like him.

 

* * *

 

“We’re not going?” Carl asked, incapable of hiding the devastation on his face as he stood in the doorway of the cabin, watching Joe gather up his rifle and a hunting knife from the opposite side of the room.

“Not today,” Joe grunted, slipping on a jacket, a cigarette pinched between his lips. “Dan got word that there’s some shithole, hodunk town a few miles north of the main roads, and rumor has it they’ve got a pharmacy and supermarket or two. We’ll need the supplies if we’re gonna be holed up here all goddamn winter.”

Carl stared at him, thinking back, trying to recall the last time he was _this_ bafflingly crushed by something so insignificant. He’d been keeping himself under control, for the most part. Hadn’t gotten upset over minor things. Hadn’t let Joe get to him the way that he used to. And yet, there he was, standing there with his hands balled into fists, a flustered blush springing to his cheeks, something tingling behind his eyes at the mere mention of just not being able to go outside.

Joe looked over at him, and lifted an eyebrow when he saw the signs of the oncoming tantrum. He pulled the cigarette from his lips and warned, “Boy, you better watch that face of yours. I haven’t had to beat your ass in a long while but I’m not above startin’ now.”

Carl dropped his gaze, his posture softening in response to the threat, a morose hopelessness settling in as he murmured, “Can we go later, then? Maybe after you get back?”

“What is it with you and the goddamn woods?” Joe responded, sounding exasperated. “We just spent half our summer sleeping and fucking in the dirt like Neanderthals, and ‘soon as I do you the kindness of putting a roof over your head, you’re lookin’ to sprint right out again? The hell is wrong with you, boy? I smack you upside the head too many times? You don’t know in from out?”

Carl fought the urge to bow his shoulders, instinct driving him to want to shrink, to cower. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I just like it… It keeps me from getting restless. And it makes me feel like I’m being useful.”

Joe considered him for a moment, the anger fading from his features as he took a drag from his cigarette and shifted his weight, contemplating something. Carl tried to keep still. It was hard to ignore the thorny, sharp sensations that filled his chest when he watched the gray tendrils waft up through Joe’s fingers—they were the same sensations that erupted when the word _snare_ rolled off Joe’s tongue. They told him that these things were tethered to something incomprehensibly painful from a long time ago. What it was, he could not think about. Couldn’t face.

So instead, he decided to look at his feet.

“Why don’t you go out on your own?”

Carl’s head snapped up. “What?”

“Don’t tell me you’re goin’ deaf as well as stupid now,” Joe grumbled, a twitch of a smirk on his lips as Carl stared dumbly at him. “I said check the traps on your own. It’s not too far out, and you know your way back, don’t you?”

Carl blinked, his eyes wide, not quite able to grasp what was being said. It was several seconds before he asked, “You’re not afraid I’ll run?”

“You got somewhere to go?”

“No,” Carl whispered.

“Then I ain’t worried.” Joe shrugged, took a drag from his cigarette, and then sauntered up to Carl with a look on his face that made Carl’s stomach flutter. He wasn’t quite smiling, but there was sincerity in the quirk of his lips, a sense of endearment in his voice as he said, “Listen. You’ve given me no problems since Billy pulled your little ass from the woods way back when. Other than havin’ to smack you in the mouth once every blue moon, I haven’t really had to show you the way. You figured it out. You know your place. You’re a good dog.” He put his hand on his shoulder and brought his face close. “Just don’t screw around. You take too long, and someone’s gonna come looking for you.”

“I won’t,” Carl breathed, skin tingling at Joe’s proximity, at his familiar smells, the warmth of his hand on his shoulder.

“The same rules apply. No one talks to you. No one touches you. You go in alone, you come out alone,” Joe continued, leaning in, brushing his lips over Carl’s in an agonizingly tender gesture, the hand with the cigarette sliding his bangs back. “Not a damn soul on this godless earth comes within ten feet of you without my say-so. Tell me why.”

Carl’s heart swelled inside of his chest. He tried to keep from trembling when Joe forced him to make eye-contact, the intimacy of it overwhelming, rolling over him like a tsunami, his own words sounding very, very distant as he said,

“Because I’m yours.”

 

* * *

 

Carl waited until Joe left before he made his way out.

Harley was still there, along with Billy and a few others, but orders kept him within the perimeter of the camp despite being conditioned to watch him, to offer a suspicious eye as Carl awkwardly headed toward the trees with nothing more than a beat-up pocketknife in hand.

It was strange to be out there when the sun had fully risen. To not hear the weighted crunch of boots at his back. To be completely alone. He was used to isolation, and both hated and feared it, but this felt different. The air was thinner when he was like this. Not thick with the stench of rot. Not inundated with the varying tastes and smells of people, of fluids, of death.

But the more distance he put between himself and the campsite, the more he sensed something that needed to be stifled and silenced by some ill-defined survival mechanism inside of him. A memory that wasn’t so much a memory as it was just some hazy sense recognition. A smell here. A sound there. A taste like chocolate on the tips of his fingers, salty with sweat.

Carl’s face pinched, and he tried to pick up his pace, feeling a little on edge. He forced himself to think instead about the people that would be waiting for him back at the camp. Harley, with his rifle and his quiet intensity, that silent fondness that felt on par with what people might feel for a family pet, would have to come looking for him. Billy, too. Maybe a couple of the others. It was dangerous to stand there to dwell on things. To think. To remember.

He had to keep going.

Their snares were set up in a small glade with a few punctures in the earth where rodents had dug. When he came upon them, he found that a couple had been broken, yanked right from the dirt by animals too large for the cords to hold. He frowned when he approached the area and began to search around, hoping to find at least one with a catch—a squirrel, a rabbit, anything, when he happened to look down, and see something glinting beneath a patch of leaves.

Carl took a step back, and slowly lifted it to the sunlight. It was an old, rusted shower ring. A hoop.

“Hey.”

Carl snapped around, nearly dropping the ring back into the dirt. Instinct drove him to tense. To take a sharp step back, as Pete emerged from the woods, hands defensively held high, the necks of two brown beer bottles dangling between his fingers.

“Whoa,” Pete laughed, looking simultaneously startled and amused by Carl’s reaction, by the blood that vanished from his cheeks when he suddenly went still. “Hey, relax. I’m sorry I scared you. That wasn’t my intention, okay? You alright?”

Carl’s eyes were huge in his face, wearing the look of a cornered animal as Pete stood staring at him—sporting that grin. It was several seconds before the horror of the situation fully dawned him. The realization that he was sharing a space with someone that wasn’t Joe. That they entered it without permission. Certainly, without Joe knowing. He felt trapped in a state of fight-or-flight, frozen in shock, adrenaline pooling into fingertips.

“Hey,” Pete repeated, voice gentler, though he was still grinning. “Relax. Seriously, you look like you’re about to pass out. I would know. I’m a doctor.”

“You can’t talk to me,” Carl whispered.

The corners of Pete’s mouth fell. A vaguely incredulous look crossed his face, and then he took a step forward. Carl took a step back. “You know, I used to have a kid your age,” he said, ignoring him. “A boy. His mom took off with him and his brother a while back. I hadn’t seen them in months, and then, one day I found his body just dangling from a tree.” He paused, and Carl could see that his eyes—blue-green—were red, hazy. Something was wrong. “He was still moving. Whoever did it, they didn’t puncture his brain. I had to do it.”

Carl could feel cold sweat gathering on his brow as he watched him stop to pop the cap off one of the bottles.

“Joe—I thought he was your dad, at first.” Pete took a swig. “I thought, what a lucky guy, to still have his boy out here. No one has that. No one still has their kids these days… Obviously, not me… But, then I saw you guys sneaking off all of the time. And I started hearing murmurs around the camp. I didn’t really put it all together until I followed you two out here, though, and I saw you on your knees.”

Carl began to feel sick, Pete’s words seeming horribly stagnant in the air, riddled with implications that turned Carl’s face red. His voice was hoarse as he murmured, “I have to go.”

“Hey, hey, hey,” Pete objected, taking a step in front of Carl when tried to leave, holding one of the bottles out toward him. “No, you don’t. Here, have a drink.”

“You can’t do this. You can’t talk to me,” Carl murmured uncomfortably, moving back, trying to put more space between them as his gaze shot up to scan the woods, not sure what or who he was looking for. An escape. A familiar face. Instead, he found Pete’s tall body repeatedly intervening in any motion he made to get away, the brown bottle still being held out, that ugly look of knowing in his eyes.

“Relax, relax, it’s okay,” Pete chuckled, stepping in front of him once more, completely cutting him off and coming just close enough for Carl to smell the pungent, skunky smell of beer on his breath. “I get it. I get how this works. You… You’re little. You’re probably not much more cut out for this world than my son was. But you do what you have to do. You’re smart, using what you know.”

Carl hadn’t realized he’d been backing up until he felt the body of a tree on his spine. His eyes were locked on Pete’s, a heavy, lead-like sensation filling his limbs, confusion clouding his senses, sweat beginning to drip down his temples. He tried to speak, but no words emerged.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Pete said with a small laugh, holding his hands out again, lifting his arms just enough for Carl to catch the grip of a pistol in his belt. “I’m not judging. Just tell me how this goes. Tell me what you want.”

“What?” Carl breathed.

“What does a beer and a couple of rabbits get me?” Pete pushed, voice dripping with insinuations as he somehow managed to draw even closer, the fabric of his clothes brushing against Carl’s body until he blanched with understanding. “Or, what about half a deer? I’ve got most of the good meat left. You can have all of it. All I want is my dick sucked.”

Carl’s skin became deathly white, his nails digging into the tree behind him as the words, “That’s not how this works,” tumbled numbly from his lips. This couldn’t be happening. It was just a mistake, a misunderstanding, and Carl had to stay calm. If he just explained things, Pete would back off, he was sure of it. All he had to do was tell him about the rules.

But before he could say anything further, Pete was pressing against him, one of the beer bottles sleeping from his fingers into the dirt so that a hand could card through his hair, grab hold, and yank so hard that Carl’s head was jerked sideways.

The pain was instantaneous—a sharp, stabbing burn that had him _screeching_ and filled his eyes with tears. His arms shot up to try and shove Pete’s large body off and away from him, but the grip on his hair kept, the nails that found his scalp digging in, drawing blood, forcing him still.

“ _All_ I want is a blowjob,” Pete hissed, his face turning red with frustration, the slight slur in his words becoming worse as he leaned forward. “My wife—she just took off, just left me, and I haven’t been with anyone since. I need this. I need to think about my wife. Do this for me, and I’ll get you whatever you want. Just suck my dick, and I will get you anything.”

Carl fought the urge to disappear, to go numb, to simply allow this to happen as the sound of a second glass bottle fell to the forest floor, and a hand made its way to his shoulder. He was being pushed downward. Forced to his knees. Hearing a voice whisper in his ear between painful clips of his earlobe, while he held a sweat-soaked shirt to his chest, and cried inside of a creaking bedroom. His heart hammered. His teeth clenched.

“If you bite me…”

_“… I’m gonna twist your neck ‘til it snaps.”_

Carl froze. He looked up at Pete, at the towering body that sneered over him, at the eyes hazy with alcohol, and a rage swarmed his insides like fire.

He must have blacked out. Because he didn’t remember screaming at the top of his lungs and reaching for his pocketknife. He didn’t remember tearing it up and stabbing it viciously into Pete’s hip, repeatedly, using Pete’s shock as leverage to shove him off, and stab into him one last time before that ugly, beat-up pocketknife broke off inside him. He didn’t remember screaming, “You’re an _asshole_!” until he was hoarse as Pete scrambled in the dirt.

He simply knew that one moment, he had been on his knees, muscles stuttering with tension and horror, and then, he was on his feet, covered in blood, holding the broken handle of his knife.

That was how Billy and Harley found him. Wide-eyed. Milk-white. Stunned.

“Little man,” Billy whispered, brows high, mouth fallen as he and Harley approached the glade, guns drawn.

Carl looked at them. Went to speak.

And then, he heard a sound, like a _pop_ , and then a sharp and sudden pressure struck his face, sending him stumbling.

His vision abruptly went black. Every nerve, from the crown of his head to his collarbones, went numb. Something warm and wet began to cascade down his neck.

Carl stood there for a moment, blind, in shock.

For a second, he thought he saw a man, bloody and beaten, with sad blue eyes, mouthing something to him from a hardwood floor. Pleading with him. Reciting the stanzas of a poem he forgot about a long time ago, just as someone began to shout.

_Dad?_

And then he fell to the ground.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize yet again for another delayed chapter. I was pretty devastated for a long time after having stumbled on the spoilers that Carl wasn’t going to survive this season, and couldn’t get myself to just sit down and write. But I hope you enjoyed this, and I hope you enjoy the following chapter, where many of the issues touched on this story culminate, and Negan finally makes his grand entrance.  
> Thank you to everyone who has continued to read despite the frustratingly slow updates, and despite the incredibly crushing choice AMC made to kill Carl off from the show (thus, destroying many beautiful in-show plot arcs that could have been used in some amazing fan stories). You’re all wonderful, and I hope the themes of life and death that continue to play out provide some sort of gratification for readers who are grappling with the loss of this character.


End file.
